M. Laurens is of the opinion that the architecture of Palma cannot be ascribed to an earlier period than the beginning of the sixteenth century. I am satisfied, however, either that many fragments of Moorish sculpture must have been used in the erection of the older buildings, or that certain peculiarities of Moorish art have been closely imitated. For instance, that Moorish combination of vast, heavy masses of masonry with the lightest and airiest style of ornament, which the Gothic sometimes attempts, but never with the same success, is here found at every step. I will borrow M. Laurens's words, descriptive of the superior class of edifices, both because I can find no better of my own, and because this very characteristic has been noticed by him. "Above the ground-floor," he says, "there is only one story and a low garret. The entrance is a semi-circular portal without ornament; but the number and dimensions of the stones, disposed in long radii, give it a stately aspect. The grand halls of the main story are lighted by windows divided by excessively slender columns, which are entirely Arabic in appearance. This character is so pronounced, that I was obliged to examine more than twenty houses constructed in the same manner, and to study all the details of their construction, in order to assure myself that the windows had not really been taken from those fairy Moresque palaces, of which the Alhambra is the only remaining specimen. Except in Majorca, I have nowhere seen columns which, with a height of six feet, have a diameter of only three inches. The fine grain of the marble of which they are made, as well as the delicacy of the capitals, led me to suppose them to be of Saracenic origin."

I was more impressed by the Lonja, or Exchange, than any other building in Palma. It dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, when the kings of the island had built up a flourishing commerce, and expected to rival Genoa and Venice. Its walls, once crowded with merchants and seamen, are now only opened for the Carnival balls and other festivals sanctioned by religion. It is a square edifice, with light Gothic towers at the corners, displaying little ornamental sculpture, but nevertheless a taste and symmetry, in all its details, which are very rare in Spanish architecture. The interior is a single vast hall, with a groined roof, resting on six pillars of exquisite beauty. They are sixty feet high, and fluted spirally from top to bottom, like a twisted cord, with a diameter of not more than two feet and a half. It is astonishing how the airy lightness and grace of these pillars relieve the immense mass of masonry, spare the bare walls the necessity of ornament, and make the ponderous roof light as a tent. There is here the trace of a law of which our modern architects seem to be ignorant. Large masses of masonry are always oppressive in their effect; they suggest pain and labor, and the Saracens, even more than the Greeks, seem to have discovered the necessity of introducing a sportive, fanciful element, which shall express the delight of the workman in his work.

In the afternoon, I sallied forth from the western coast-gate, and found there, sloping to the shore, a village inhabited apparently by sailors and fishermen. The houses were of one story, flat-roofed, and brilliantly whitewashed. Against the blue background of the sea, with here and there the huge fronds of a palm rising from among them, they made a truly African picture. On the brown ridge above the village were fourteen huge windmills, nearly all in motion. I found a road leading, along the brink of the overhanging cliffs, toward the castle of Belver, whose brown mediaeval turrets rose against a gathering thunder-cloud. This fortress, built as a palace for the kings of Majorca immediately after the expulsion of the Moors, is now a prison. It has a superb situation, on the summit of a conical hill, covered with umbrella-pines. In one of its round, massive towers, Arago was imprisoned for two months in 1808. He was at the time employed in measuring an arc of the meridian, when news of Napoleon's violent measures in Spain reached Majorca. The ignorant populace immediately suspected the astronomer of being a spy and political agent, and would have lynched him at once. Warned by a friend, he disguised himself as a sailor, escaped on board a boat in the harbor, and was then placed in Belver by the authorities, in order to save his life. He afterwards succeeded in reaching Algiers, where he was seized by order of the Bey, and made to work as a slave. Few men of science have known so much of the romance of life.

I had a long walk to Belver, but I was rewarded by a grand view of the Bay of Palma, the city, and all the southern extremity of the island. I endeavored to get into the fields, to seek other points of view; but they were surrounded by such lofty walls that I fancied the owners of the soil could only get at them by scaling-ladders. The grain and trees on either side of the road were hoary with dust, and the soil of the hue of burnt chalk, seemed never to have known moisture. But while I loitered on the cliffs the cloud in the west had risen and spread; a cold wind blew over the hills, and the high gray peaks behind Valdemosa disappeared, one by one, in a veil of rain. A rough tartana, which performed the service of an omnibus, passed me returning to the city, and the driver, having no passengers, invited me to ride. "What is your fare?" I asked. "Whatever people choose to give," said he,—which was reasonable enough: and I thus reached the Four Nations in time to avoid a deluge.

The Majorcans are fond of claiming their island as the birthplace of Hannibal. There are some remains supposed to be Carthaginian near the town of Alcudia, but, singularly enough, not a fragment to tell of the Roman domination, although their Balearis Major must have been then, as now, a rich and important possession. The Saracens, rather than the Vandals, have been the spoilers of ancient art. Their religious detestation of sculpture was at the bottom of this destruction. The Christians could consecrate the old temple to a new service, and give the names of saints to the statues of the gods; but to the Moslem every representation of the human form was worse than blasphemy. For this reason, the symbols of the most ancient faith, massive and unintelligible, have outlived the monuments of those which followed.

In a forest of ancient oaks near the village of Arta, there still exists a number of Cyclopean constructions, the character of which is as uncertain as the date of their erection. They are cones of huge, irregular blocks, the jambs and lintels of the entrances being of single stones. In a few the opening is at the top, with rude projections resembling a staircase to aid in the descent. Cinerary urns have been found in some of them, yet they do not appear to have been originally constructed as tombs. The Romans may have afterwards turned them to that service. In the vicinity there are the remains of a Druid circle, of large upright monoliths. These singular structures were formerly much more numerous, the people (who call them "the altars of the Gentiles") having destroyed a great many in building the village and the neighboring farm-houses.

I heard a great deal about a cavern on the eastern coast of the island, beyond Arta. It is called the Hermit's Cave, and the people of Palma consider it the principal thing to be seen in all Majorca. Their descriptions of the place, however, did not inspire me with any very lively desire to undertake a two days' journey for the purpose of crawling on my belly through a long hole, and then descending a shaky rope-ladder for a hundred feet or more. When one has performed these feats, they said, he finds himself in an immense hall, supported by stalactitic pillars, the marvels of which cannot be described. Had the scenery of the eastern part of the island been more attractive, I should have gone as far as Arta; but I wished to meet the steamer Minorca at Alcudia, and there were but two days remaining.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Souvenirs d'un Voyage d'Art a l'Isle de Majorque. Par J.-B. Laurens.



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.

In the present paper we propose to consider six dramatists who were more immediately the contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have the precedence in time, and three of them, if we may believe some critics, not altogether without claim to the precedence in merit, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. These are Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman.

They belong to the school of dramatists of which Shakespeare was the head, and which is distinguished from the school of Jonson by essential differences of principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite external rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the keeping of his characters were called in question. Shakespeare constructed his, not according to any rules which could be drawn from the practice of other dramatists, but according to those interior laws which the mind, in its creative action, instinctively divines and spontaneously obeys. In his case, the appeal is not to the understanding alone, but to the feelings and faculties which were concerned in producing the work itself; and the symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who could not frame an argument to sustain it. The laws to which his genius submitted were different from those to which other dramatists had submitted, because the time, the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at, were different. The time demanded a drama which should represent human life in all its diversity, and in which the tragic and comic, the high and the low, should be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The dramatists of whom we are about to speak represented them in juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally combining them so as to produce symmetrical works. Their comedy and tragedy, their humor and passion, move in parallel rather than in converging lines. They have diversity; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor tends to, a central principle of organization or of order, the result is often a splendid anarchy of detached scenes, more effective as detached than as related. Shakespeare alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable materials of his drama, to organize this anarchy into a new and most complex order, and to make a world-wide variety of character and incident consistent with oneness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his work this organic form, put forth his whole strength to give it mechanical regularity; every line in his solidest plays costing him, as the wits said, "a cup of sack." But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a force that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into their elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new substance, is a force so different in kind from Jonson's, that it would of course be idle to attempt an estimate of its superiority in degree. And in regard to those minor dramatists who will be the subjects of the present paper, if they fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly all afford scenes and passages superior to his best in depth of passion, vigor of imagination, and audacious self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart.

The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, except that he was one of the most prolific writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became an actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases it, "came and hired himself to me as a covenanted servant for two years." The date of his first published drama is 1601; that of his last published work, a "General History of Women," is 1657. As early as 1633 he represents himself as having had an "entire hand, or at least a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays, of which only twenty-three were printed. "True it is," he says, "that my plays are not exposed to the world in volumes, to bear the title of Works, as others: one reason is, that many of them, by shifting and change of companies, have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print; and a third, that it was never any great ambition in me to be in this kind voluminously read." It was said of him, by a contemporary, that he "not only acted every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years; but many of his plays being composed loosely in taverns, occasions them to be so mean." Besides his labors as a playwright, he worked as translator, versifier, and general maker of books. Late in life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all the poets of the world, including his contemporaries. Had this project been carried out, we should have known something about the external life of Shakespeare; for Heywood must have carried in his brain many of those facts which we of this age are most curious to know.

Heywood's best plays evince large observation, considerable dramatic skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and an easy command of language. His style, indeed, is singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward; but it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as almost to be characterless, and incapable of flashing its thoughts through the images of imaginative passion. He is more prosaic, closer to ordinary life and character, than his contemporaries. Two of his plays, and the best of them all, "A Woman killed with Kindness," and "The English Traveller," are thoroughly domestic dramas, the first, and not the worst, of their class. The plot of "The English Traveller" is specially good; and in reading few works of fiction do we receive a greater shock of surprise than in Geraldine's discovery of the infidelity of Wincott's wife, whom he loves with a Platonic devotion. It is as unanticipated as the discovery, in Jonson's "Silent Woman," that Epicaene is no woman at all, while at the same time it has less the appearance of artifice, and is more the result of natural causes.

With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the reader's interest to his fable, harsher in versification, and generally clumsier in construction, the best plays of Thomas Middleton are still superior to Heywood's in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of matter. It must, however, be admitted that the sentiments which direct his powers are not so fine as Heywood's. He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he conceives his whole work is performed. This criticism applies even to his tragedy of "Women beware Women," a drama which shows a deep study of the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in exhibiting the passions in their consecutive, if not in their conflicting action, and a firm hold upon character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity; its power is out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters, while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen through no visionary medium of sentiment and fancy; and the reader feels the force of Leantio's own agonizing complaint, that his affliction is

"Of greater weight than youth was made to bear, As if a punishment of after-life Were fall'n upon man here, so new it is To flesh and blood, so strange, so insupportable."

There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind; and the hard, bald caustic peculiarity of his genius, which is unpleasingly felt in reading any one of his plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as we plod doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works. Like the incantations of his own witches, it "casts a thick scurf over life." It is most powerfully felt in his tragedy of "The Changeling," at once the most oppressive and impressive effort of his genius. The character of De Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of iniquity, such as we think is hardly paralleled in the whole range of the Elizabethan drama. The passions of this brute imp are not human. They are such as might be conceived of as springing from the union of animal with fiendish impulses, in a nature which knew no law outside of its own lust, and was as incapable of a scruple as of a sympathy.

But of all the dramatists of the time, the most disagreeable in disposition, though by no means the least powerful in mind, was John Marston. The time of his birth is not known; his name is entangled in contemporary records with that of another John Marston; and we may be sure that his mischief-loving spirit would have been delighted could he have anticipated that the antiquaries, a century after his death, would be driven to despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the other. It is more than probable, however, that he was the John Marston who was of a respectable family in Shropshire; who took his bachelor's degree at Oxford in 1592; and who was afterwards married to a daughter of the chaplain of James the First. Whatever may have been Marston's antecedents, they were such as to gratify his tastes as a cynical observer of the crimes and follies of men,—an observer whose hatred of evil sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer could not be thus dishonored without being brought prominently into notice, and old Henslowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his libellous ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn from Henslowe's diary, under date of September 28, 1599, that he had lent to William Borne "to lend unto John Mastone," "the new poete," "the sum of forty shillings," in earnest of some work not named. There is an undated letter of Marston to Henslowe, written probably in reference to this matter, which is characteristic in its disdainfully confident tone. Thus it runs:—

"MR. HENSLOWE, at the Rose on the Bankside.

"If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well, and you shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for it, but If nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as I know the kinges men will freelie give me as much for it, and the profitts of the third daye moreover.

"Soe I rest yours,

"JOHN MARSTON."

He seems not to have been popular among the band of dramatists he now joined, and it is probable that his insulting manners were not sustained by corresponding courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him, both literary and personal, and mentions one occasion on which he beat him, and took away his pistol. His temper was Italian rather than English, and one would conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the fist. His connection with the stage ceased in 1613, after he had produced a number of dramas, of which nine have been preserved. He died about twenty years afterwards, in 1634, seemingly in comfortable circumstances.

Marston's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all bear the mark of his bitter and misanthropic spirit,—a spirit that seemed cursed by the companionship of its own thoughts, and forced them out through a well-grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His comedies of "The Malcontent," "The Fawn," and "What You Will," have no genuine mirth, though an abundance of scornful wit,—of wit which, in his own words, "stings, blisters, galls off the skin, with the acrimony of its sharp quickness." The baser its objects, the brighter its gleam. It is stimulated by the desire to give pain, rather than the wish to communicate pleasure. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though it is sometimes that of the hyena, and sometimes that of the polecat. In his Malcontent he probably drew a nattering likeness of his inner self: yet the most compassionate reader of the play would experience little pity in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, indeed, of Marston's satire is directed at depravity, that Ben Jonson used to say that "Marston wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law his comedies." It is to be hoped, however, that the spirit of the chaplain's tirades against sins was not, like his son-in-law's, worse than the sins themselves.

If Marston's comic vein is thus, to use one of Dekkar's phrases, that of "a thorny-toothed rascal," it may be supposed that his tragic is a still fiercer libel on humanity. His tragedies, indeed, though not without a gloomy power, are extravagant and horrible in conception and conduct. Even when he copies, he makes the thing his own by caricaturing it. Thus the plot of "Antonio's Revenge" is plainly taken from "Hamlet," but it is "Hamlet" passed through Marston's intellect and imagination, and so debased as to look original. Still, the intellect in Marston's tragedies strikes the reader as forcible in itself, and as capable of achieving excellence, if it could only be divorced from the bad disposition and deformed conscience which direct its exercise. He has fancy, and he frequently stutters into imagination; but the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expressiveness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which disgust rather than delight. His description of a storm at sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this perversion of his poetical powers:—

"The sea grew mad:

* * * *

Strait swarthy darkness popt out Phoebus' eye, And blurred the jocund face of bright-cheek'd day; Whilst cruddled fogs masked even darkness' brow; Heaven bade's good night, and the rocks groaned At the intestine uproar of the main."

It must be allowed that both his tragedies and comedies are full of strong and striking thoughts, which show a searching inquisition into the worst parts of human nature. Occasionally he expresses a general truth with great felicity, as when he says,

"Pygmy cares Can shelter under patience' shield; but giant griefs Will burst all covert."

His imagination is sometimes stimulated into unusual power in expressing the fiercer and darker passions; as, for example, in this image:—

"O, my soul's enthroned In the triumphant chariot of revenge!"

And in this:—

"Ghastly amazement! with upstarted hair, Shall hurry on before, and usher us, Whilst trumpets clamor with a sound of death."

He has three descriptions of morning, which seem to have been written in emulation of Shakespeare's in "Hamlet"; two of them being found in the tragedy which "Hamlet" suggested.

"Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes With silver tincture the east verge of heaven?

* * * *

For see the dapple-gray coursers of the morn Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs, And chase it through the sky.

* * * *

Darkness is fled: look; look, infant morn hath drawn Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night; And now Aurora's house trots azure rings, Breathing fair light about the firmament."

These last two lines appear feeble enough as contrasted with the beautiful intensity of imagination in Emerson's picturing of the same scene:—

"O, tenderly the haughty Day Fills his blue urn with fire."

The most beautiful passage in Marston's plays is the lament of a father over the dead body of his son, who has been defamed. It is so apart from his usual style, as to breed the suspicion that the worthy chaplain's daughter, whom he made Mrs. Marston, must have given it to him from her purer imagination:—

"Look on those lips, Those now lawn pillows, on whose tender softness Chaste modest speech, stealing from out his breast, Had wont to rest itself, as loath to post From out so fair an inn: look, look, they seem To stir. And breathe defiance to black obloquy."

If among the dramatists of the period any person could be selected who in disposition was the opposite of Marston, it would be Thomas Dekkar,—a man whose inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him through vexations and miseries which would have crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He was probably born about the year 1575; commenced his career as player and playwright before 1598; and for forty years was an author by profession, that is, was occupied in fighting famine with his pen. The first intelligence we have of him is characteristic of his whole life. It is from Henslowe's Diary, under date of February, 1598: "Lent unto the company, to discharge Mr. Decker out of the counter in the powltry, the sum of 40 shillings." Oldys tells us that "he was in King's Bench Prison from 1613 to 1616"; and the antiquary adds ominously, "how much longer I know not." Indeed, Dr. Johnson's celebrated condensation of the scholar's life would stand for a biography of Dekkar:—

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

This forced familiarity with poverty and distress does not seem to have imbittered his feelings or weakened the force and elasticity of his mind. He turned his calamities into commodities. If indigence threw him into the society of the ignorant, the wretched, and the depraved, he made the knowledge of low life lie thus obtained serve his purpose as dramatist or pamphleteer. Whatever may have been the effect of his vagabond habits on his principles, they did not stain the sweetness and purity of his sentiments. There is an innocency in his very coarseness, and a brisk, bright good-nature chirps in his very scurrility. In the midst of distresses of all kinds, he still seems, like his own Fortunatus, "all felicity up to the brims"; but that his content with Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her caprice and injustice is proved by the words he puts into her mouth:—

"This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports. Sometimes I strike it up into the air, And then create I emperors and kings; Sometimes I spurn it, at which spurn crawls out The wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools, 'Tis I that tumble princes from their thrones, And gild false brows with glittering diadems; 'T is I that tread on necks of conquerors, And when like semi-gods they have been drawn In ivory chariots to the Capitol, Circled about with wonder of all eyes, The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts, Being swoln with their own greatness, I have pricked The bladder of their pride, and made them die As water-bubbles (without memory): Whilst the true-spirited soldier stands by Bareheaded, and all bare, whilst at his scars They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars. I set an idiot's cap on virtue's head, Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags, And paint ten thousand images of loam In gaudy silken colors: on the backs Of mules and asses I make asses ride. Only for sport to see the apish world Worship such beasts with sound idolatry. She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name, And some with adoration crown her fame."

The boundless beneficence of Dekkar's heart is specially embodied in the character of the opulent lord, Jacomo Gentili, in his play of "The Wonder of a Kingdom." When Gentili's steward brings him the book in which the amount of his charities is recorded, he exclaims impatiently:—

"Thou vain vainglorious fool, go burn that book; No herald needs to blazon charity's arms.

* * * *

I launch not forth a ship, with drums and guns And trumpets, to proclaim my gallantry; He that will read the wasting of my gold Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind Will scatter ere he spells it."

He will have neither wife nor children. When, he says,

"I shall have one hand in heaven, To write my happiness in leaves of stars, A wife would pluck me by the other down. This bark has thus long sailed about the world, My soul the pilot, and yet never listened To such a mermaid's song.

* * * *

My heirs shall be poor children fed on alms; Soldiers that want limbs; scholars poor and scorned; And these will be a sure inheritance Not to decay; manors and towns will fall, Lordships and parks, pastures and woods, be sold; But this land still continues to the lord: No tricks of law can me beguile of this. But of the beggar's dish, I shall drink healths To last forever; whilst I live, my roof Shall cover naked wretches; when I die, 'T is dedicated to St. Charity."

We should not do justice to Dekkar's disposition, even after these quotations, did we omit that enumeration of positives and negatives which, in his view, make up the character of the happy man:—

"He that in the sun is neither beam nor moat, He that's not mad after a petticoat, He for whom poor men's curse dig no grave, He that is neither lord's nor lawyer's slave, He that makes This his sea and That his shore, He that in 's coffin is richer than before, He that counts Youth his sword and Age his staff. He that upon his death-bed is a swan. And dead no crow,—he is a Happy Man."

As Dekkar wrote under the constant goad of necessity, he seems to have been indifferent to the requirements of art. That "wet-eyed wench, Care," was as absent from his ink as from his soul. Even his best plays, "Old Fortunatus," "The Wonder of a Kingdom," and another whose title cannot be mentioned, are good in particular scenes and characters rather than good as wholes. Occasionally, as in the character of Signior Orlando Friscobaldo, he strikes off a fresh, original, and masterly creation, consistently sustained throughout, and charming us by its lovableness, as well as thrilling us by its power; but generally his sentiment and imagination break upon us in unexpected felicities, strangely better than what surrounds them. These have been culled by the affectionate admiration of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, and made familiar to all English readers. To prove how much finer, in its essence, his genius was than the genius of so eminent a dramatist as Massinger, we only need to compare Massinger's portions of the play of "The Virgin Martyr" with Dekkar's. The scene between Dorothea and Angelo, in which she recounts her first meeting with him as a "sweet-faced beggar-boy," and the scene in which Angelo brings to Theophilus the basket of fruits and flowers which Dorothea has plucked in Paradise, are inexpressibly beautiful in their exquisite subtlety of imagination and artless elevation of sentiment. It is difficult to understand how a writer capable of such refinements as these should have left no drama which is a part of the classical literature of his country.

One of these scenes—that between Dorothea, the Virgin Martyr, and Angelo, an angel who waits upon her in the disguise of a page—we cannot refrain from quoting, familiar as it must be to many readers:—

"Dor. My book and taper.

"Ang. Here, most holy mistress.

"Dor. Thy voice bends forth such music, that I never Was ravished with a more celestial sound. Were every servant in the world like thee, So full of goodness, angels would come down To dwell with us; thy name is Angelo, And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest; Thy youth with too much watching is oppressed.

"Ang. No, my dear lady; I could weary stars, And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes, By my late watching, but to wait on you. When at your prayers you kneel before the altar, Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven, So blest I hold me in your company. Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence, For then you break his heart.

"Dor. Be nigh me still then. In golden letters down I'll set that day Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself, This little pretty body, when I, coming Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy, My sweet-faced, godly beggar-boy, crave an alms, Which with glad hand I gave,—with lucky hand! And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom Methought was filled with no hot wanton fire, But with a holy flame, mounting since higher, On wings of cherubim, than it did before.

"Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye So likes so poor a servant.

"Dor. I have offered Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents. I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some, To dwell with thy good father.... Show me thy parents; Be not ashamed.

"Angelo. I am not: I did never Know who my mother was; but by yon palace, Filled with bright heavenly courtiers, I dare assure you, And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand, My father is in heaven; and, pretty mistress, If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand, No worse than yet it does upon my life, You and I both shall meet my father there, And he shall bid you welcome.

"Dor. O blessed day! We all long to be there, but lose the way."

But the passage in all Dekkar's works which will be most likely to immortalize his name is that often-quoted one, taken from a play whose very name is unmentionable to prudish ears:—

"Patience, my lord! why, 't is the soul of peace; It makes men look like gods—The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a Sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

A more sombre genius than Dekkar, though a genius more than once associated with his own in composition, was John Webster, of whose biography nothing is certainly known, except that he was a member of the Merchant Tailors' Company. His works have been thrice republished within thirty years; but the perusal of the whole does not add to the impression left on the mind by his two great tragedies. His comic talent was small; and for all the mirth in his comedies of "Westward Hoe" and "Northward Hoe" we are probably indebted to his associate, Dekkar. His play of "Appius and Virginia" is far from being an adequate rendering of one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever crept into history. "The Devil's Law Case," a tragi-comedy, has not sufficient power to atone for the want of probability in the plot and want of nature in the characters. The historical play of "Sir Thomas Wyatt" can only be fitly described by using the favorite word in which Ben Jonson was wont to condense his critical opinions,—"It is naught." But "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" are tragedies which even so rich and varied a literature as the English could not lose without a sensible diminution of its treasures.

Webster was one of those writers whose genius consists in the expression of special moods, and who, outside of those moods, cannot force their creative faculties into vigorous action. His mind by instinctive sentiment was directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of life. He brooded over crime and misery until his imagination was enveloped in their atmosphere, found a fearful joy in probing their sources and tracing their consequences, became strangely familiar with their physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering sympathy with their "deep groans and terrible ghastly looks." There was hardly a remote corner of the soul, which hid a feeling capable of giving mental pain, into which this artist in agony had not curiously peered; and his meditations on the mysterious disorder produced in the human consciousness by the rebound of thoughtless or criminal deeds might have found fit expression in the lines of the great poet of our own times:—

"Action is momentary,— The motion of a muscle, this way or that. Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite."

With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's power as a dramatist consists in confining the domain of his tragedy within definite limits, in excluding all variety of incident and character which could interfere with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and in the intensity with which he arrests, and the tenacity with which he holds the attention, as he drags the mind along the pathway which begins in misfortune or guilt, and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime on crime, with such fatal facility, that he would render the mind callous to his terrors, were it not that what is acted is still less than what is suggested, and that the souls of his characters are greater than their sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The crimes and the criminals belong to Italy as it was in the sixteenth century, when poisoning and assassination were almost in the fashion; the feelings with which they are regarded are English; and the result of the combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually were. Thus Ferdinand, in "The Duchess of Malfy," is the conception formed by an honest, deep-thoughted Englishman of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated in those maxims of policy which were generalized by Machiavelli. Webster makes him a devil, but a devil with a soul to be damned. The Duchess, his sister, is discovered to be secretly married to her steward; and in connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not only resolves on her death, but devises a series of preliminary mental torments to madden and break down her proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear; a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow." This mockery only brings from her firm spirit the proud assertion, "I am Duchess of Malfy still." Indeed, her mind becomes clearer and calmer as the tortures proceed. At first she had imprecated curses on her brothers, and cried,

"Plagues that make lanes through largest families, Consume them!"

But now, when the executioners appear, when her dirge is sung, containing those tremendous lines,

"Of what is 't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their birth weeping, Their life a general mist of error, Their death a hideous storm of terror,"—

when all that malice could suggest for her torment has been expended, and the ruffians who have been sent to murder her approach to do their office, her attitude is that of quiet dignity, forgetful of her own sufferings, solicitous for others. Her attendant, Cariola, screams out:

"Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers: alas! What will you do with my lady? Call for help.

"Duchess. To whom,—to our next neighbors? They are mad folks.

"Bosola. Remove that noise.

"Duchess. Farewell, Cariola. In my last will I have not much to give: A many hungry guests have fed upon me; Thine will be a poor reversion.

"Cariola. I will die with her.

"Duchess. I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please: What death?

"Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.

* * * *

"Duchess. Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength Must pull down heaven upon me: Yet stay, heaven-gates are not so highly arched As princes' palaces; they that enter there Must go upon their knees. Come, violent death. Serve for mandragora to make me sleep. Go, tell my brothers; when I am laid out, They then may feed in quiet."

The strange, unearthly stupor which precedes the remorse of Ferdinand for her murder is true to nature, and especially his nature. Bosola, pointing to the dead body of the Duchess, says:

"Fix your eye here.

"Ferd. Constantly.

"Bosola. Do you not weep? Other sins only speak; murther shrieks out: The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

"Ferd. Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; She died young.

"Bosola. I think not so; her infelicity Seemed to have years too many.

"Ferd. She and I were twins: And should I die this instant, I had lived Her time to a minute."

We have said that Webster's peculiarity is the tenacity of his hold on the mental and moral constitution of his characters. We know of their appetites and passions only by their effects on their souls. He has properly no sensuousness. Thus in "The White Devil," his other great tragedy, the events proceed from the passion of Brachiano for Vittoria Corombona,—a passion so intense as to lead one to order the murder of his wife, and the other the murder of her husband. If either Fletcher or Ford had attempted the subject, the sensual and emotional motives to the crime would have been represented with overpowering force, and expressed in the most alluring images, so that wickedness would have been almost resolved into weakness; but Webster lifts the wickedness at once from the senses into the region of the soul, exhibits its results in spiritual depravity, and shows the Satanic energy of purpose which may spring from the ruins of the moral will. There is nothing lovable in Vittoria. She seems, indeed, almost without sensations; and the affection between her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Francisco, the brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him:

"Thou hast a wife, our sister; would I had given Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee But one."

This is the language of the intensest passion, but as applied to the adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little more than the utterance of reasonable regret; for devil can only truly mate with devil, and Vittoria is Brachiano's real "affinity."

The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is traced with more than Webster's usual steadiness of nerve and clearness of vision. The evil they inflict is a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for vengeance; and at last, when the avengers of crime have become morally as bad as the criminals, they are all involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is probably Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud, glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil courage which shrinks from crime as little as from danger, she meets her murderers with the same self-reliant scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill her attendant first," exclaimed one of them.

"Vittoria. You shall not kill her first; behold my breast: I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me.

"Gasparo. Are you so brave!

"Vittoria. Yes, I shall welcome death, As princes do some great ambassadors; I'll meet thy weapon half-way.

"Lodovico. Strike, strike, With a joint motion.

"Vittoria. 'T was a manly blow; The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant, And then thou wilt be famous."

Webster tells us, in the Preface to "The White Devil," that he does not "write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers"; and also hints that the play failed in representation through its being acted in winter in "an open and black theatre," and because it wanted "a full and understanding auditory." "Since that time," he sagely adds, "I have noted most of the people that come to the playhouse resemble those ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; yet after all this divine rapture, O dura messorum ilia, the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it."

Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is the most Shakespearian. His genius was not only influenced by its contact with one side of Shakespeare's many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have been considering abound in expressions and situations either suggested by or directly copied from the tragedies of him he took for his model. Yet he seems to have had no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare to all other dramatists; and in his Preface to "The White Devil," after speaking of the "full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the labored and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without wrong last to be named," of "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekkar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felicitous a classification as would be made by a critic of our century, who should speak of the "right happy and copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master Dickens, and Master G. P. R. James.

Webster's reference, however, to "the full and heightened style of Master Chapman" is more appropriate; for no writer of that age impresses us more by a certain rude heroic height of character than George Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the University of Oxford, he seems, on his first entrance into London life, to have acquired the patronage of the noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. His greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who had attempted his work in other languages:

"They failed to search his deep and treasures heart. The cause was, since they wanted the fit key Of Nature, in their downright strength of art, With Poesy to open Poesy."

Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his many comedies and tragedies some sixteen were printed. It is to be feared that the last twenty years of his long and honorable life were passed in a desperate struggle for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the dignity of his art were so inwoven into his character that he probably met calamity bravely. Poesy he early professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom, being composed, in his own words, of the "sinews and souls of all learning, wisdom, and truth." "We have example sacred enough," he said, "that true Poesy's humility, poverty, and contempt are badges of divinity, not vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magistracy" can content "I (for my part) shall ever esteem it much more manly and sacred, in this harmless and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties; all your poor policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no more valuing than a musty nut." These sentiments were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634, friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died. Anthony Wood describes him as "a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate; qualities," he spitefully adds, "rarely meeting in a poet."

Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. But when we turn to the dramas from which these grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chapman to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed his trumpet to his ear when he himself talked.

This criticism applies more particularly to his tragedies, and to his expression of great sentiments and passions. His comedies, though over-informed with thought, reveal him to us as a singularly sharp, shrewd, and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly wisdom, and not deficient in airiness any more than wit. Hazlitt, we believe, was the first to notice that Monsieur D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the style of writing"; and Tharsalio in "The Widow's Tears," and Ludovico in "May-Day," have the hard impudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and glorying self-unrighteousness, that distinguish another class of characters which the dramatists of the age of Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with insolence and repartees. Occasionally we have a jest which Falstaff would not disown. Thus in "May-Day," when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to get, if possible, "certain odd crowns" the latter owes him, Quintiliano says, "I think thou 'rt newly married?" "I am indeed, sir," is the reply. "I thought so; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less perceived." Chapman, in his comedies generally, shows a kind of philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flimsier, if fairer, creature than man, and he sustains his bad judgment with infinite ingenuity of wilful wit and penetration of ungracious analysis. In "The Widow's Tears" this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the whole plot and incidents, as well as gives edge to many an incisive sarcasm. My sense, says Tharsalio, "tells me how short-lived widows' tears are, that their weeping is in truth but laughing under a mask, that they mourn in their gowns and laugh in their sleeves; all of which I believe as a Delphian oracle, and am resolved to burn in that faith." "He," says Lodovico, in "May-Day,"—he "that holds religious and sacred thought of a woman, he that holds so reverend a respect to her that he will not touch her but with a kist hand and a timorous heart, he that adores her like his goddess, let him be sure she will shun him like her slave.... Whereas nature made" women "but half fools, we make 'em all fool: and this is our palpable flattery of them, where they had rather have plain dealing." In all Chapman's comic writing there is something of Ben Jonson's mental self-assertion and disdainful glee in his own superiority to the weakness he satirizes.

In passing from a comedy like "May-Day" to a tragedy like "Bussy D'Ambois," we find some difficulty in recognizing the features of the same nature. "Bussy D'Ambois" represents a mind not so much in creation as in eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no less than flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian; but fustian is rant in the words when there is no corresponding rant in the soul; whilst Chapman's tragedy, like Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," indicates a greater swell in the thoughts and passions of his characters than in their expression. The poetry is to Shakespeare's what gold ore is to gold. Veins and lumps of the precious metal gleam on the eye from the duller substance in which it is imbedded. Here are specimens:—

"Man is torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance; And as great seamen, using all their wealth And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths, In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass, To put a girdle round about the world, When they have done it (coming near their haven) Are fain to give a warning piece, and call A poor stayed fisherman, that never past His country's sight, to waft and guide them in: So when we wander furthest through the waves Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state, Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches, As if each private arm would sphere the earth, We must to Virtue for her guide resort, Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port."

"In a king All places are contained. His words and looks Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove; His deeds inimitable, like the sea That shuts still as it opes, and leaves no tracks, Nor prints of precedent for mean men's acts."

"His great heart will not down: 't is like the sea That partly by his own internal heat, Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion, Their heat and light, and partly of the place The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon Bristled with surges, never will be won, (No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst,) To make retreat into his settled home, Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam."

"Now, all ye peaceful regents of the night, Silently gliding exhalations, Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters, Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness, Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest That ever wrought upon the life of man, Extend your utmost strengths; and this charmed hour Fix like the centre."

"There is One That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind: He sees through doors and darkness and our thoughts."

"O, the dangerous siege Sin lays about us! and the tyranny He exercises when he hath expugned: Like to the horror of a winter's thunder, Mixed with a gushing storm, that suffer nothing To stir abroad on earth but their own rages, Is sin, when it hath gathered head above us."

"Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames! That with thy music-footed horse doth strike The clear light out of crystal, on dark earth, And hurl'st instinctive fire about the world, Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night, That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle: O thou great prince of shades, where never sun Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness, and see ever best Where men are blindest! open now the heart Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear Of some ill it includes would feign lie hid, And rise thou with it in thy greater light."

It is hardly possible to read Chapman's serious verse without feeling that he had in him the elements of a great nature, and that he was a magnificent specimen of what is called "irregular genius." And one of his poems, the dedication of his translation of the Iliad to Prince Henry, is of so noble a strain, and from so high a mood, that, while borne along with its rapture, we are tempted to place him in the first rank of poets and of men. You can feel and hear the throbs of the grand old poet's heart in such lines as these:—

"O, 't is wondrous much, Though nothing prized, that the right virtuous touch Of a well-written soul to virtue moves; Nor have we souls to purpose, if their loves Of fitting objects be not so inflamed. How much were then this kingdom's main soul maimed, To want this great inflamer of all powers That move in human souls.

* * * *

Through all the pomp of kingdoms still he shines, And graceth all his gracers.

* * * *

A prince's statue, or in marble carved, Or steel, or gold, and shrined, to be preserved, Aloft on pillars and pyramides, Time into lowest ruins may depress; But drawn with all his virtues in learned verse, Fame shall resound them on oblivion's hearse, Till graves gasp with their blasts, and dead men rise."



OUR PACIFIC RAILROADS.

Two thirds of the United States lie west of the Mississippi River. This vast domain has already exercised a tremendous influence over our political destiny. The Territories were the immediate occasion of our civil war. During an entire generation they furnished the arena for the prelusive strife of that war. The Missouri Compromise was to us of the East a flag of truce. But neither nature nor the men who populated the Western Territories recognized this flag. The vexed question of party platforms and sectional debate, the right and the reason of slavery, solved itself in the West with a freedom and rough rapidity natural to the soil and its population. Climatic limitations and prohibitions went hand in hand with the inflow of an emigration mainly from the Northern States,—an emigration fostered by political emotions and fevered by political injustice. While the South was menacing and the North deprecating war, far removed from this tumult of words the conflict was going on, and was being decided. And it was because slavery was doomed in the great West, and therefore in the nation, that rebellion ensued.

It is worthy of note that the same generation which witnessed the growth of the Calhoun school of politics in the South, and of the Free Soil and (afterward) the Republican party in the North, and which followed with intense interest the stages of the Territorial struggle, witnessed also the employment of steam and electricity as agents of human progress. These agents, these organs of velocity, abbreviating time and space, said, Let the West be East; and before the locomotive the West fled from Buffalo to Chicago, across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the desert steppes beyond, and down the Pacific slope, until it stared the Orient into a self-contradiction.

It was on the part of our government a sublime recognition of the power of steam, that, while it was struggling for existence, it gave its sanction to the Pacific Railroad enterprise. Curiously enough, it is through Kansas and Nebraska—the Epidaurus of our Peloponnesian war—that the two great rival Pacific Railroad routes are to run.

In the summer of 1861, the project of a trans-continental railway connecting our Pacific communities with the older population of the East first assumed a practical aspect. For nearly three decades the nation had been dreaming of the scheme, but it had done little more than dream. Almost with the earliest track-laying in America, a visionary New-Yorker startled a sceptical generation by proclaiming the age of steam, and pointing at the locomotive as the instrument whereby men should yet penetrate the mysterious depths of the Far West, and secure for our growing commerce the prize of Asiatic wealth. Curious readers will find in the New York Courier and Enquirer of 1837 an article by Dr. Hartley Carver, advocating a Pacific Railroad; and in view of how little was known at this time of the country beyond the Alleghanies,—so little, indeed, that the Territories of the extreme West had no definite outline, but were measured from the crest of the Rocky Mountains,—the audacity of the proposition might justly have inspired suspicions of the sanity of its author. But if Dr. Carver was chimerical, he was at least courageous in his persistence. Ten years later, this lineal descendant of old John Carver transferred the question from the arena of newspaper discussion, and boldly memorialized Congress. Here he found a rival advocate in Asa Whitney, whose brain throbbed with the glowing possibilities of the Chinese trade, while his specious statistics and contagious eloquence arrested public attention. Neither of these projectors, however, found the atmosphere of Washington propitious. Failing there, they once more had recourse to the press. The discovery of gold in California gave fresh vigor to the agitation. In 1850, that notable railroad king, William B. Ogden, lent his name to the enterprise, and by his cogent and well-considered appeals excited confidence in statesmen and capitalists. Three years after, Congress yielded to the popular pressure, and ordered those surveys, the result of which lies in eleven bulky departmental volumes, and bears the name of "Pacific Railroad Reports." Then came the Fremont campaign, with its burning enthusiasm, the Pacific Railroad plank in the Republican platform, and the defeat which was almost a victory. The succeeding year a strong effort was made to secure a national charter; but though supported by the Senate, the measure failed to carry in the Lower House.

This disastrous rebuff at Washington produced a profound indignation throughout wide sections; yet it may be questioned whether the arguments on which the railway scheme was based were sufficiently solid to justify such encouragement to the investment of floating capital as the passage of the bill would have implied. Beyond the Missouri River, even on the line of Western travel, population was as sparsely scattered as in an Indian reservation. Neither the gold reaches of Colorado nor the silver-bearing "leads" of the Washoe district had as yet been discovered. California was known only as a region of placer-digging, and its agricultural capacities were very inadequately comprehended. Nor had the Pacific Steamship Company ventured to create its China line. A railroad certain to cost one hundred and forty millions, as the War Department asserted, had in prospect for an immediate revenue only the meagre trade of Salt Lake City, and the freightage of bullion from the Pacific shore. Indeed, the prevailing faith in the enterprise almost passes belief, when it is remembered that no satisfactory survey had been made of the Sierra Nevada. That terrible pile of snow-crowned peaks, of deep-sunk ravines, of jagged ridges and perilous chasms, where the winding bridle-track scarcely permits a driver to walk beside his mule, seemed to defy the skill of our boldest engineers. Overland travellers reported depths of snow varying from twenty to fifty feet. Fearful stories were narrated of luckless wagon-trains caught in the narrow defiles by sudden mountain storms, and perishing helplessly amid these Alpine rigors. It was surely a legitimate question whether a railroad were possible in the face of such embarrassments; and it is fair to attribute the adverse action of Congress to these considerations, rather than to occult and scarcely explicable sectional motives.

At the commencement of the next decade, all this, however, was changed. California had developed into a rich grape-producing country. Its cereals were beyond the demands of local consumption. A considerable trade had sprung up with Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, and latterly with China. The production of quicksilver was on the increase. Valuable copper mines had recently been opened. Moreover, the immense gold seams of Colorado, the vast silver deposits in Nevada, and the auriferous quartz of Idaho, were disclosed almost simultaneously, diverting population to the interior table-lands, and calling loudly for an economical method of transit. Upon the Pacific shore, the desire for a through road suddenly became intensified, while the profitableness of a railway, at least to the Humboldt Sink, became more and more apparent. If only the Sierra might be pierced! That appalling obstacle still threw its shadow over the enterprise. Fortunately, at this very crisis there wandered down from the mountain, in the pleasant summer days, a railway surveyor and engineer, Theodore D. Judah, who had had extensive Eastern experiences, and Californian as well. He was a thin, short, light-haired Massachusetts man, enthusiastic, conscientious, cautious, and with a quick eye for discovering the opportunities of science amid the obstacles of nature,—a trait which in an engineer is rightly named genius. While engaged in the survey of private claims, he had worked out what appeared, on a hurried examination, to be a perfectly feasible route through the hills. At Sacramento he modestly stated this belief; and in a resident merchant, Mr. C. P. Huntington, he found a willing listener. Mr. Huntington, who is to the California end of the Pacific Railroad what Durant is to the co-operating Nebraska branch, describes in graphic language the earnest consultations, prolonged for several weeks, which he and a few other friends held in Leland Stanford's store after the day's business was through. There were seven of these men all told, not one of them worth less than half a million, and each ready to stake his entire property in the enterprise, if it promised success. The maps of the new-comer were consulted, the lines carefully studied, and the result of their deliberations was the temporary organization of what is now known as the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California. The engineer in whose representations so much confidence was placed soon proved that he was worthy of that confidence; money was forthcoming; an adequate surveying party was sent out; and in the summer months of 1861, Judah demonstrated the existence of a route by the South Yuba River and the Donner Pass greatly superior to all other projected lines, with no insuperable engineering difficulties, and capable of defence against all interruption by freshet or snow. In the mean while the State Legislature had granted a charter to the incorporators in July; and at the first stockholders' meeting Stanford was elected president and Huntington vice-president of the company. It was evident, however, that an undertaking of such vast dimensions could not be completed without government help; and the Sacramento party, confident that in Mr. Judah's surveys lay the solution of the Pacific problem, repaired at once to Washington, and opened anew the railroad agitation.

While the energy of the West was still engaged in penetrating the secrets of the formidable Sierra, a movement meaning work began to develop itself on the Eastern border. As a general statement, and without reference to individual routes, it may be said that in the Northern cis-Mississippi States there are two separate railroad systems, running in lines about parallel from east to west; the upper combination of routes debouching at Chicago, the lower, or central, at St. Louis. These lines are slightly entangled with the roads concentrating at Cincinnati and Indianapolis; but the division into an upper and lower route is sufficiently preserved to admit of distinct classification. The capitalists of both the great cities which form the terminal points of these systems had long been equally alive to the vast possibilities of the Pacific trade, and were eager, not only from local pride, but also from knowledge of the simplest principles of commercial policy, to secure to their respective communities the main bulk of this immense prospective traffic. With this view, Chicago had projected three lines across the State of Iowa, all of which were ultimately to converge at Council Bluffs. Thence across the coffee-colored Missouri, over rolling prairies, and up the slowly curving line of the Platte, stretched an easily rising ascent, which, engineers affirmed, had been graduated by nature as the most direct and practicable route for the interoceanic railroad. As yet no one of these Iowa lines was complete; but they all had a corporate existence, and their stockholders formed a nucleus for a distinct Pacific movement.

St Louis, on the other hand, aided by the State of which it was the commercial capital, had as early as 1851 commenced the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railway, whose line shot straight as an arrow westward across the State, curving slightly to the north at its terminus, which was fixed at Kansas City. Four years later, the Territorial government of Kansas incorporated the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western Railroad, with privilege to build from Leavenworth to Fort Riley, and thence westerly. It is apparent that the two companies might readily connect, and thus form a rival grand trunk Pacific road.

Both the upper and the lower-enterprises, however, remained for many years after their inception in a quiescent state, serving simply as topics of newspaper discussion, or of buncombe addresses from local rostrums. But in 1860-61 the unexpected discovery of large deposits of the precious metals in Colorado and in Nevada gave an enormous impulse to the carrying trade of the plains, and the same argument which proved so cogent in California aroused the Western capitalists from their lethargy. Rumors of the new line over the Sierra also found their way East; and the Legislature of Kansas, now a young and vigorous State, passed a joint resolution in March, 1862, urging on Congress the immediate creation of a national Pacific Railroad Company. In anticipation of this action, the agents of the lower route had already proceeded to Washington, where they found themselves suddenly in the presence, not only of the representatives of the Central Company of California, but also of the Chicago projectors and their New York friends.

It will scarcely be profitable at the present time to descend into the particulars of the rivalry which interests in many respects so divergent necessarily entailed. A gentleman who had singular opportunities for arriving at an unprejudiced judgment recently informed the writer of this article that one company alone employed the element of "influence" to the extent of three millions of dollars, or its supposed equivalent. Facts of this nature, however, are outside of our purpose; and we shall limit our illustration of the character of the struggle to a brief glance at the curious tangle of compromises which the charter itself presents. Passed in the Lower House by a catch vote, and pushed with difficulty through the Senate by appeals to party pledges, by unimpeachable proofs of the feasibility of the scheme and the financial integrity of its advocates, and above all by intimations amounting almost to threats of a possible secession of the Pacific communities, the act of 1862 bears the evidence of a conflict of purposes in almost every one of its sections. It is evident, for example, that, with the tide of civil war beating fiercely around the national capital, Congress was still under the spell of the past, and severely distrustful of any avoidable increase of public obligations. Bonds were loaned to the enterprise at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per mile for the easy work, with treble aid for the mountain division and double for the Salt Lake Valley; but this loan was made a first mortgage, twenty-five per cent, was reserved till the completion of the road, and the transit business of government was to be paid solely by the extinguishment of the bonded debt. The land grant also was but six thousand four hundred acres per mile. The clashing interests of St. Louis and Chicago are shown in the ignoring of any special eastern terminus, and the location of the initial point of a new trunk road upon the one hundredth meridian, at some equidistant station, to be designated by the President. As the Kansas party was already possessed of an organization, the charter modified this advantage by incorporating the Nebraska line[B], under the name of the Union Pacific Company, and gave it a predominant place in the specifications of the act. The aid of government, however, was proffered in equal degree to the road which was to cross the mountains from Sacramento, and to both the Eastern lines; the last two being required to complete a hundred miles each within two years after they had respectively filed their assent to the terms of the act, while the Central was to build at the rate of twenty-five miles a year up the ridges of the Sierra.

In hard-currency times, and with the labor and iron market easy, these terms might have been sufficient to invite the ready aid of capital. But the close of 1862 and the year succeeding were the darkest periods of the war. Gold vibrated from 140 to 180. Iron, which in 1859, sold for $35 a ton, was now selling for $130. Moreover, while money was tight, labor was also scarce. The two great agencies on which a vast public work like this must inevitably depend proved utterly inadequate to the emergency. Nevertheless, both the companies which had already an organic existence bent themselves with no inconsiderable vigor to their task. The Central Pacific accepted the responsibilities and obligations of the charter six months after its passage, and commenced the work of grading in the succeeding February. Rails, chairs, and rolling stock were forwarded by sea, involving heavy expenditures for freightage, and a ten per cent war risk on insurance. The company endured further embarrassments from the lack of capital, and the fact that in California a metallic currency formed the only circulating medium. Nor was it the least of its difficulties that the enterprise met with an ambiguous reception in many portions of the State, San Francisco especially regarding it with cold indifference. The zeal with which the road was pushed amid these embarrassments is a striking evidence of the thorough faith of its projectors. Although it soon became apparent that further legislation would be needed to relieve them from the disabilities inherent in the meagreness of the government subsidy, they nevertheless succeeded by the 6th of June, 1864, in cutting their line through to New Castle, and in laying thereon a solid and continuous track.

In Kansas, the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western Railroad Company or, as they were beginning to style themselves the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, had contracted for an immediate and rapid construction of their line as early as September 30th. By the spring of 1863, the contractors, Messrs. Ross, Steele, & Co., had involved themselves to the extent of five millions, of dollars, and were in full operation with an adequate corps of laborers, grading, quarrying stone, building culverts, etc. Suddenly, however, all this busy movement ceased. By one of those strange revolutions that occasionally occur in the management of corporations, a man notorious throughout the whole border, familiarly called Sam Hallet, assumed control of the company, denounced the contract as in nowise valid, and peremptorily ordered the agents of the contracting party to abandon the work. The agents refused. Affairs now assumed the aspect of war. Hallet procured a company of United States dragoons from Fort Leavenworth, and rode down upon the contumacious contractors. The result of this cavalry dash is rather picturesquely described in a letter of this novel railroad general, dated August 15, 1863:—

"I have had an awful row with Carter, a battle on the works, and a sharp 'pitch in' to get possession; we drove them back, and into the river, until they cried enough. S. S. Sharp, my foreman Section No. 1, led Carter to the river-bank by the collar; and but for his begging, he would have ducked him. I expect Steele and Carter on again with reinforcements. Let them come! We will put them into the river the next time. We have had to use strong force, quick and bold. We have taken all their ties, houses, and works, and shall hold them."

Triumphant on the battle-field, Hallet now made a rapid counter-movement, and effected a transfer of the ownership of the company to a new set of capitalists, putting them into immediate possession of the entire property of the old corporation. Of the legal merits of this singular manoeuvre we are not prepared to give an opinion; but it is proper for us to add, that it met with vigorous resistance on the part of the former stockholders, at the head of whom stood Fremont. Sharp litigations and stormy altercations ensued; and for many months most vital to its interests the whole Kansas enterprise was shut from view.

While these two companies were moving forward, the one steadily overcoming financial and engineering difficulties, the other plunging into an inexplicable imbroglio of contested management and contested contracts, that great combination of capitalists which held the destinies of the Union Pacific met at Chicago in September, 1862, and took the preliminary steps for the formation of a company. Books for stock subscriptions were opened in every loyal State and Territory. In June of the next year the acceptance of the charter by a provisional direction was filed at Washington. Nevertheless, an annoying apathy filled the public mind. Capital was shy of the enterprise. The terms of the act of 1862 were deemed unsatisfactory. Up to August, 1863, only about eighty thousand dollars had been subscribed.

At this point, Thomas C. Durant, whose connection with Western roads had inspired so much faith in the Pacific project, threw the weight of his capital and influence so determinately into the scale, that by October the subscriptions had reached two millions, and the company was in a condition to organize. Major-General John A. Dix was elected president, Dr. Durant became vice-president and general manager, and the preliminary survey which he had ordered at his personal expense was approved and officially adopted by the direction. As, however, a wide-spread feeling existed, not only that additional legislation was necessary, but that it might also be obtained, the company contented itself that year with the selection of its eastern terminus. President Lincoln was consulted; and, acting upon his unofficial sanction, the Union Pacific broke ground for the railroad at Omaha, then a struggling village in Nebraska Territory, nearly opposite Council Bluffs. The inaugural ceremony took place December 2d, and with this event the year closed.

For the next few months the efforts of all the companies converged upon Congress. The Union Pacific Company appeared at Washington in great force. The Central, equally urgent, presented arguments that amounted to demonstration; the chief points being the energy with which they had striven to comply with the terms of the charter, and the painful failure that had attended their endeavor,—a failure clearly imputable to the insufficiency of the original bill. The Kansas Company, though rent in twain by rival boards of directors, was also on the ground, animated by very ambitious purposes, and with a determination to win its ends in spite of internal complications. The vigor with which the latter body took the field gave a complex character to the struggle, and very much prolonged it. On vital points, however, all parties were in accord, and in the main results of the campaign each achieved a splendid success. The supplementary bill, approved July 2, 1864, as much surpassed the legislation of two years previous as the sixteen hundred million national debt of 1864 exceeded the five-hundred million debt of 1862; The colossal expenditures of the war had led Congressmen to accept the estimates of railroad men with implicit credence, and to second their demands with generosity. The land grant was doubled, the government bonds were made a second lien to the roads under construction, the twenty-five per cent reservation was removed, and one half of government business was to be paid in money.

The Union Pacific Company effected an important modification of the charter in respect to their particular interests. Their maximum capital was still fixed at one hundred millions, but individual shares were lowered from a thousand to a hundred dollars each. Furthermore, the hitherto unwieldy board of direction was limited to fifteen members. On the other hand, the Kansas organization obtained the privilege of making their own road the grand trunk route, connecting with the Central Pacific, in case they should anticipate the Nebraska line in reaching the one hundredth meridian, and the latter road should not appear to be proceeding in good faith.

As the act which bestowed such signal favors had granted an extension of a year for the completion of the first division of each road, the Union Pacific was under no absolute compulsion to hasten its work. Nevertheless, surveying parties were kept in the field, and the contract for the construction of the road to the one hundredth meridian was signed in August. This agreement, though nominally known, as the Hoxie contract, derived the guaranty of its performance from the Credit Mobilier,—an organization with an actual capital of two millions and a half, recently created upon the model of the great Paris corporation, and in the hands of a few moneyed men whose enterprise and energy were admirably proportioned to their large wealth. Its heaviest capitalists were also stockholders in the projected road; and as payment was to be made in bonds and shares, the Credit Mobilier at once became an over-shadowing stockholder in the Union Pacific. The arrangement at a subsequent period may not have been wholly beneficial; but at the date of the contract the alliance was of incalculable importance. Although two millions of stock had been subscribed, the Nebraska line had in reality only twenty thousand dollars in its treasury. Without the Credit Mobilier, it would have faltered on the threshold of success. Even with this powerful auxiliary, it was not yet strong enough to prevent an unexpected and vexatious delay.

The first forty miles west from Omaha had been intrusted to Peter A. Dey, an engineer of some experience in the West. This gentleman, whose ideas seem to have been limited to a straight line, had constructed a track satisfactory in its alignments, but with a maximum grade of eighty feet per mile, and involving temporary grading of one hundred and sixteen feet at several points of the route. A later survey, made under the supervision of Colonel Seymour, demonstrated the existence of a far better line with forty-feet grades and but nine miles longer. Placed upon abstract grounds, there was no question of the relative advantage of the two routes. The combined opinion of several of the most skilful railroad managers in the country was unanimous for the lower grade, as essential to rapid and economical transportation. But there was another element in the case which gave a different aspect to the affair. Dey's line terminated at Omaha; Seymour's, at Bellevue. If the new route were selected, all the magnificent dreams of the Omaha land speculators would be summarily dispelled. The territorial population caught the alarm. Public meetings were called. A committee was sent post to Washington. It was asserted, on grounds that were not destitute of plausibility, that the change was attributable quite as much to motives of a stock-jobbing order, as to economic considerations. To this charge Dr. Durant indignantly replied, but this did not appease the clamor. Nor was the dispute ended until after five months of tedious investigation, and a guaranteed promise on the part of the company, that, in adopting the new line, there should be no alteration of terminus.

While Omaha was still in the white-heat of excitement, the contractors had been steadily employed in collecting material for a grand industrial campaign. Distant, in the line of travel then open to them, more than sixteen hundred miles from New York, with the Missouri River as their main avenue for the transportation of rolling stock and machinery west of St. Louis, the men who had undertaken to build the road bent themselves to the task with a vigor and celerity heretofore unequalled in railroad history. Iron from New England, shipped in coasting-vessels, and working its slow way through the Gulf of Mexico and up the knotted bends of the Mississippi; iron, from Pennsylvania by the lower route, and from New York by upper lines; iron in all conditions and shapes, from rails, chains, and spikes, to car-wheels and steam-engines,—came pouring in week by week, a tonnage beyond all estimate or comparison, and involving, from the want of rail connections, unparalleled expenditures. The transportation of one class of freight alone cost thirteen hundred thousand dollars. All other expenses were upon the same magnificent scale. Nebraska, though admirably adapted for agriculture, is singularly destitute of woodland. The lumber for building, and the cross-ties for track-laying, could only be obtained in small quantities and at great distances. Many of the sleepers travelled two hundred miles before they found repose on the road-bed. The labor market also was but scantily supplied, and agents for procuring navvies were despatched east, west, and south. But the splendid energy of the contractors had been fruitful of success. A vast aggregate of forces stood ready at the melting of the winter's snow and the click of the telegraph key to spring into enormous activity.

About the middle of April, 1866, the message came, and the work began. Along the dead level of the Platte Valley, through endless reaches of prairie, and behind the meagre shelter of outlying hills, the rails are still falling in place,—a continuous belt of iron out-rolled over black loam and arid sand,—mile after mile, day after day; and with the close of the present year there will stretch an unbroken line of five hundred and twenty miles of rail across the Plains to the foot of the Black Hills. There is no occasion to dilate upon the wonderful systemization of labor which has characterized the work of construction. The public is already well apprised of the details, from the pens of industrious and graphic newspaper correspondents. The company itself has been by no means laggard in celebrating its enterprise. Excursion parties of capitalists, editors, and Congressmen have severally given in their testimony; but, after all, the one fact that in less than twenty months American energy has brought the Rocky Mountains within two and one half days' journey of New York—though the distance is two thousand miles—tells the whole story. One of the chief difficulties of this Nebraska route has been, as we have intimated, the scarcity of suitable material for cross-ties, and of fuel for the engines. The employment of Burnetized cottonwood, and the discovery of a very considerable quantity of cedar in the interior, have, however, effectually solved one phase of this problem; while for the production of steam science now offers petroleum as a practical substitute for wood and coal. But independently of this, the road has already reached the bituminous beds of the Black Hills, where it will probably find a plentiful supply for its necessities. Water also is obtained in sufficient quantities by digging from ten to twenty feet down, to the sand which filters the waters of the Platte.

Shortly after the Nebraska Company had thrown off the drag-weight of local embarrassment, the Kansas line began to disentangle itself from legal complications; and on July 1, 1865, the enterprise passed into the hands of a management which, if powerless to retrieve the past, was at least determined to make the future secure. At the head of this new organization was John D. Perry of St Louis; and associated with him were a body of capitalists in Missouri and Pennsylvania whose financial ability was unquestioned, and who have since evinced a vigor and commercial prescience which elevate them to the level of their Eastern rivals. Perceiving that the miserable Fremont-Hallet quarrel had effectually frustrated all rivalry in the construction of a track to the one hundredth meridian, they made application to Congress for an extension of their line to Denver, by the Smoky Hill Fork, with the privilege of connecting at that point with the Union Pacific. The request was readily granted, and the usual land gift of twelve thousand eight hundred acres per mile accorded for the entire route. No further issue of government bonds was allowed; but as the company was now possessed of adequate capital, and as the loans to the other companies must all eventually be paid back, there was really very little difference in financial advantage on the side of the Nebraska line. Moreover, the slight balance against the Kansas route was quite made up in the greater fertility of the soil which it would traverse, and the large preponderance of its local business, the population along the line being treble that of the upper road. These considerations gave an elasticity to the Kansas project, and under the new management the work of construction has gone on rapidly. The present year will probably find the road halting at not less than three hundred and fifty miles west of Wyandotte, now the junction-point of the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. But this company is not satisfied with a simple connection with the Nebraska road. It proposes, after making this connection, to continue its main line to San Francisco by an extensive detour southward, avoiding the difficult mountain systems between Denver and Sacramento, and at the same time availing itself of that immense trade which lies visible or latent throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California. Escaping the overwhelming snows of the Rocky Mountains, this route will pass through a salubrious region abounding in timber and bituminous coal.[C] By intersecting the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, it will hold out to the Southern States a tempting invitation to form connections, and share to the fullest extent in the benefits of this great national enterprise. In this way the Pacific Railroad stands ready to second Congress in the work of "reconstruction."

Of the Central Pacific Road we have not as yet spoken adequately, and shall now be compelled to give the history of its achievements in a wholly insufficient space. Unlike the Eastern roads, it has allowed no pause in its work from the day of the first track-laying to the present moment. Unlike these roads, also, it has had to contend with great engineering difficulties from the start, while the material for its construction required to be brought over distances to which the transportation annoyances of the other lines offer no parallel. All the rolling stock, rails, etc. doubled Cape Horn. The timber for the trestle-work of bridges was brought from Puget's Sound. For laborers it had recourse to China. To reach the crest of the Sierra, they were obliged to pierce the hillsides fifteen times, the tunnelling alone amounting in continuous line to 6,262 feet. The eight-hour labor movement was an additional embarrassment. Embankments built up with incalculable labor, and protected by every device of engineering science, settled in many cases, and were repaired only after much delay and vast expense. Nevertheless, the indomitable projectors of the enterprise have proved themselves equal to their task. The Summit Tunnel was cut through in August of this year; and by November the road will have been extended, not only to the crest of the mountains, but far down the eastern slope. Hunter's, which is the wagon depot of the Nevada miners, two hundred and seventy-four miles from San Francisco, and one hundred and fifty miles from Sacramento, is the point which the locomotive is certain to reach by the close of 1867.[D]