They were composed of the old Ikbals, favour- | comfortable as is the body in wearing anothites of Ibraham Pacha, and some of those who er person's dress. Either it will not fit behad ceased to rank as such, or, as the slaves cause it was meant for persons of different figemphatically termed it, to please the 'Baba Ef-ure and height, or if it fits, it will not suit, endimir."" because the worsted or flannel which keeps one person in a comfortable glow chafes the skin of another into a fever. So it is also like poets, make their own, as silkworms with the poetical dress of those who do not, weave their own cocoons. Teachers can She rather liked the little Prince, however, who had the making of a man in him, ruined by early absolutism. No order he gave at six years old was ever resisted. He flung red-hot coals in slaves' faces with the most not bear to use another person's selection perfect impunity, and tore out the lips of one of his half-sisters with no consequence of poetry, nor even readers to see pieces save a sudden order from his mother that they do not care for, or dislike, extracted the sufferer should kiss the hem of his robe. at great length, while their own private His favourite pursuit was to play at banktreasures are ignored. But the curious thing is that though they cannot satisfy ing and drilling the little slaves, two games themselves with other persons' selections, curiously illustrative of the unique position occupied by the Pachas of Egypt, the great- they almost always start with the purpose of making other persons love their own; est merchant princes on the globe. He and his sisters ate with gold spoons and their and in order to do this will even sacrifice to fingers out of a tray, which looked after- some extent that dominant taste of theirs which led them to prepare a special selecwards like the tray of remnants carried out tion for their separate use. Thus the ediof a dirty cook-shop. The badness of her diet ultimately drove Mrs. Lott out of the tor of the beautiful selection of poems called, somewhat artificially we think, Poems of the harem, just as she had become reconciled Inner Life, admits that he has included a to a position which was, we imagine, not number which he would not otherwise have without considerable pecuniary profit. The included, and excluded of course in conseimpression left by her whole book is that a great Asiatic harem is a microcosm of Asia, quence some of his own more special favoursplendour and squalor, luxury and discomites, on the false idea of being catholic. "I have purposely avoided applying any fort, adventure and monotony, licence and slavery, so inextricably commingled that no very rigid personal test, that might make account ever reveals more than half the the whole contents of the volume too closely conformable to my own especial taste and feeling." In other words, he has purposely avoided applying strictly the only principle of unity that he had to apply. If he were to include all poems to which a cultivated taste could assign a real merit bearing on spiritual thoughts and feelings, his collection would have been made, we suppose, in ten thick volumes instead of one thin one. The only sort of sifting principle he had to apply was the sieve of personal liking,- -and he feared to apply it thoroughly, lest it should result in not gaining the wide suffrage for his book which he desired. That is, he included some poems he did not very much care for, as a sort of bait to people who do not care very much for his own favourites to read them and learn to like them. "You shall have this dirge of Felicia Hemans'," we can imagine him saying to himself, "which is, however, not really very good, as a tribute to your own private prejudices, in order that it may inspire you with some respect for the editor's taste, and so lead you to admire this one of Henry Vaughan's, which I myself enjoy above everything." We must say we think the editor has made a mistake in a selection of truth. From the Spectator. POETICAL SELECTIONS.* THE strong impulse which almost all people who love poetry, and are not themselves poets, feel to select their own selection of poems is curious enough. The dislike to using the selections of others, even when they are as indisputably good as the Golden Treasury of Mr. Palgrave, or the Children's Garland of Mr. Coventry Patmore, is not unlike the dislike to wearing another person's coat, or gown, or under-garments. Men's and women's imaginations weave for themselves a sort of poetical vesture that suits their own wants and expresses their own hearts; they search in vain in the collections of others for the poems that strike the most musical chord in their own minds, and not finding it, they fret and are as un *Poems of the Inner Life. Selected chiefly from Modern Authors. Sampson Low. this sort in not applying rigidly the only test he had to apply. It was not as if the volume were meant for use in religious services. Then no doubt a much more external test-the test of general acceptance - would have been legitimate. But such selections as these exist in abundance, and the only raison d'être of a new one, is the existence of a new intensity of personal love for the poems it includes. It is most likely that “ R. C. J." has not only sacrificed his own judgment wherever he has included a poem as a bait to the popular taste which he did not himself particularly admire, but done so without succeeding in netting so many admirers for his book as he would otherwise have had. However, the selection is unquestionably a fine one, and includes many poems that are not familiar to ordinary English readers. As a matter of course, the present reviewer resents the inclusion of some, and feels profoundly how much better the space would have been occupied by others that are neglected; but there are none without some beauty, and a large number, if not most of them, are really fine poems. Here is one little known to the English public, and with a dash of mysticism in it, but which has always struck us as worthy of a poet of the first order. It is by the late Mr. W. C. Roscoe : "SYMBOLS OF VICTORY. "Yellow leaves on the ash-tree, Soft glory in the air, And the streaming radiance of sunshine, On the leaden clouds over there. "At a window a child's mouth smiling, Overhung with tearful eyes At the flying rainy landscape "Angels hanging from heaven, "A dying man on his pillow Whose white soul fed to his face, Puts on her garment of joyfulness And stretches to Death's embrace. "Passion, rapture, and blindness, Yearning, aching, and fears, And, faith and duty gazing With steadfast eyes upon tears. "I see, or the glory blinds me Of a soul divinely fair, Peace after great tribulation, And victory hung in the air." We should add that the volume is beautifully printed, and that the little ornamental vignettes at the close of the poems are full of grace and spirit. From the Saturday Review, 13 Jan. AMERICAN SYMPATHIES. WE have lately been favoured with several expositions of the sentiments with which Americans generally regard the nations of the Old World. In the last number of the Fortnightly Review, Mr. Conway has given a curious picture of their view of the relative merits of France and England. The result at which he arrives cannot be called satisfactory. The Americans might, he says, be forced into a war in order to turn the French out of Mexico; but it would be a war to which the whole current of popular sentiment would be opposed. On the other hand, should any circumstances provoke a war with England; they would go into it with enthusiasm. It would gratify the whole body of the nation, with the exception of that class - insignificant in number in all countries. whose policy is dictated rather by reason than by passion. The great majority would snatch, with unmixed pleasure, at any pretext for fighting and, if possible, humiliating England. This amiable temper has of course been aggravated, and in some classes produced, by our attitude in the late Whatever ground they may have had for the belief, Americans undoubtedly did believe that Englishmen all but unanimously rejoiced in the dangers of the great Republic, gloated over their misfortunes, and were generally convinced that those misfortunes were only a righteous punishment for their manifold shortcomings. It might have been more Christian to forgive such feelings, supposing them to have existed, but it was certainly more natural to retaliate them. And, whether right or wrong, we must be prepared for the simple fact, that a good many grudges have been accumulated against this country in the last few years, which our scrupulous neutrality was unable to avert, and which Americans would be only too glad to satisfy before they have had time to die out. At the same time, a similar contrast between France and England had been familiar to the popular mind in America long before the war. There was a certain vein of sentiment, which was worked principally to obtain ma contest. terials for after-dinner speeches, about Englishmen and Americans being of the same blood, having a common interest in Shakspeare and Bacon, and both enjoying the right of trial by jury, the habeas corpus, and other themes of conventional oratory. But this was chiefly confined to the most educated classes; and there was very little cordiality wasted by the masses upon this Transatlantic affections. There are certain very obvious reasons which go to explain this unpleasant tendency to set us down as the least favoured nation, and which are worth notice as illustrating the value of the judgments passed by different countries upon each other. An American writer has said that when two people are talking together there are really six people concerned in the dialogue. In the first place, there are the true A. and B. who are conversing; then there is the hypothetical A., who exists only in A.'s own imagination, and the very different A., who exists only in the imagination of B. Adding two similar duplicates of B., we get the whole number of six. This, which holds true of individuals, is still more conspicuously true in the relations of different nations. For the imaginary being, who stands for a whole people to the mind either of one of his component units or to one of the other race, has fewer features of the original than our mental picture of another man. The John Bull who stands to many foreigners, and even to some Englishmen, as the concrete embodiment of our peculiarities is derived from an almost extinct variety of a breed which was never numerous; and the mere habit of representing a nation by such an imaginary type is in itself misleading. It is one reason why people constantly forget what a very large number thirty million is, and consequently what a wonderful variety of circumstances and characters are certain to be included in thirty millions of human beings. A whole nation can be thus lumped together, and be made a much more convenient butt for insult and resentment, and can have all sorts of evil motives and passions attributed to it with much more facility, than if one really remembered to what a very complex set of phenomena the word "nation" corresponds. Thus the Americans keep a kind of dummy, which combines all the real and supposed demerits of three generations of Englishmen. When Mr. Quilp wished to give some vent to his dislike of Kit Nubbles, he selected an old figure-head with some vague resemblance to Mr. Nubbles' features, and in his leisure moments belaboured it with a po ker, drove nails into its eyes, and otherwise expressed the sentiments with which the original inspired him. Every American stump orator keeps in his repertory some such hideous image, to be assaulted in public as the representative of England. It is easy to discover the materials from which this misshapen doll has been patched up. They are the products of all the passions that have been excited during the last ninety years. Every quarrel has brought its additional touches of ugliness to the picture. England has served of necessity to round every period about military glory or about national independence two topics which no nation can do without. Perhaps we never oppressed the Americans very badly, and they never beat us very gloriously; but if you have not got a Waterloo and a Duke of Wellington, a New Orleans and a General Jackson must serve the turn; and if there is no Alba to denounce, George III. sounds just as well in a popular oration. Hence a good framework was made for the popular dummy out of a mixture of the brutal oppressor and the defeated enemy. As the efforts of American diplomacy could not often be directed against anybody else, a number of touches were easily supplied from the Continental fancy portraits of perfidious Albion. The effect of the whole was heightened by the contributions of imported Irish artists, whose powers of imagination have been signally exerted in delineations of the Saxon oppressor. And it is not wonderful if, on the whole, the John Bull of English admirers of themselves was represented by a very hideous and appalling scarecrow on the other side of the Atlantic. When a half-educated American spoke of England, he really spoke of the figure projected upon his imagination by the accumulated abuse and irritation of all the quarrels in which his national pride had been concerned. And the constant intercourse and identity of language of the two countries kept its colouring bright. The equally imaginary Frenchman was necessarily depicted in much less lively colours. There had been comparatively no friction between the two countries to produce such an explosion of vituperative eloquence. France stood in the background behind England, and, chiefly in compliance with the necessities of art, was made to serve as a foil to our manifold atrocities. It is always pleasant to talk of national gratitude and traditionary alliances, if only as an oratorical relief to a monotony of denunciation; and it is especially pleasant when there is no prospect of the gratitude being severely tested. Gratitude is ious adversary. We have the honour of appearing in the diabolic character, whilst France stands dimly hovering behind us in a semi-angelic attitude. During the late war, indeed, when France and England were for the time partners in villany, Russia was introduced as the happy contrast, and certain delicate flirtations showed that Americans could swallow a good strong dose of despotism if it intervened on the right side. But the tendency to restore to France its ancient standing is evident. One man may, we know, steal a horse, when another may not look over a gate. And France is allowed for a time to lay a hand upon Mexico, when England would have been very summarily sent to the right-about. If England, as Mr. Conway says, had been the unlucky intruder, we should have been at war before this time. As it is, our cousins are content with carefully storing up all our omissions and commissions, with a view to future possibilities, whilst they are only too anxious to forgive and forget all that our troublesome neighbour may have done, if he will just keep his hands off in future. generally out of place in any question of in- | France is probably, therefore, the reaction ternational policy, because it is generally the from the hatred to England. The popular duty of a nation to act entirely with a view to instinct imitates a Machiavellian policy, in its own interests, and because there is a toler-seeking for an ally against its most obnoxable certainty that its neighbours have done the same. We are apt in this, as in other cases, to be misled by a false analogy with the relations. It is desirable primâ facie to return a good service done by one man to another, because there is at least a presumption of its having been prompted by goodwill. But, as between nations, no such presumption exists. Nothing can be plainer than that France helped America in the War of Independence, exclusively with a view to injuring England. She had not the slightest intention of founding a great republic, and if her statesmen could have foreseen the reaction upon their own system, they would probably have done the colonies no service, even at the price of doing us no harm. It was, therefore absurd to set up any claim for gratitude, as, indeed, Washington very sensibly and emphatically remarked. But there was so much pleasure in dilating on the heroic Lafayette and on generous national sympathies and hereditary alliances, that such a claim was, in fact, very effectually established. The French had such a hold upon the sympathies of the democratic party that, even after acts of warfare That the prevalence of such sentiments had been committed, the two nations con- is dangerous, and might at any moment betrived to remain at peace; whereas Eng- come a serious calamity, is undeniable. land was forced into the second war, even Meanwhile, there is one comfort. There is after the most substantial grounds of quar- a very wide difference between lashing rel had been removed. There is another your whipping-post at home, and actually rather curious point about this sentiment. carrying out your benevolent intentions Such men as Jefferson continued to the des- against the nation of which he is the reprepotism of Napoleon the sympathy which sentative. When war becomes a contingenthey had originally given to the revolution- cy seriously contemplated, instead of a mere ists as apostles of popular authority. This threat, a more genuine likeness sometimes seems to imply the existence of an instinct comes out behind the conventional caricawhich still contributes to the preference of ture. We look a little more carefully at France over England. The portraits of the our antagonist, and take his measure with "bloated aristocrat are principally drawn some reference, though often a very vague from English society. The democratic sen- reference, to facts. It is thus a longer way timent is stimulated more by a hatred of than we sometimes think from the prejudiprivileged classes than by a dislike to strong ces of a nation to its expression of those pre-. central power; and perhaps the English judices by actual force of arms. No people House of Peers may be a greater mystery is really quite foolish and wicked enough to of iniquity to the popular American mind go to war with another merely because than even the Napoleonic absolutism. But it has taken a dislike to it. On the contrathis is doubtless a secondary consideration; for it comes to much the same thing to a stump orator whether he denounces the people as slaves to a brutal despot or as minions of a corrupt aristocracy. Distinctions of such a refined nature about nations so far off are not worth considering. The mainspring for the partiality for ry, the most violent hostility of spirit is far less important than a very trifling cause of jealousy, although it makes much more noise. The fact is, that we exaggerate the space which we occupy in the minds of a foreign nation. Nine out of ten of the statements we hear about them refer to their sentiments about ourselves, and we insensibly come to imagine that nine out of ten of their thoughts have reference to the same subject; whereas the number of people in any country who have even an effectual belief in the existence of other human beings beyond their own frontiers is not great, and the number who possess any vivid conception of them is smaller still. As population increases in the more remote American States which have little contact with the Europeans, there will be a larger proportion of men who simply care nothing for foreign politics. And, if it would be rash to hope that they will ever substitute a less hideous and distorted image for their present ideal Englishman, they will at least become more inclined to let it alone, and grow tired of abusing their plaything. No doubt any wound inflicted upon the national vanity, in its present state, would be more than usually apt to fester; but, if special causes of irritation do not turn up, the danger will probably tend to diminish rapidly. From the Saturday Review. LUCKY FRIENDS. IF Rochefoucauld's celebrated maxim, that the misfortunes of our friends are never entirely disagreeable to us, be true, it is an obvious corollary that rare and peculiar good fortune on the part of the same friends is never wholly satisfactory to us. It is of no use complaining of the manifest cynicism of remarks of this kind. They are cynical inasmuch as they draw attention to a very ugly and unamiable side of human nature. The only question worth discussing is whether that ugly side exists. If it is all pure calumny, if the average of men are free from all taint and suspicion of selfishness and meaness, then to concoct terse epigrams which ascribe these qualities generally to mankind is doubtless a very unworthy occupation. It is highly probable that such epigrams would be far less frequent if they were utterly absurd and purposeless. And it is worth considering whether those who are for ever drawing sublime and angelic pictures of human nature, declaring as a great statesman recently did and with about the same amount of sincerity and point- that they at least are on the side of the angels, are really so usefully and honourably employed as they would have us think. It may be very noble, and to some people very com forting, to dwell in a general way exclusively on the brighter qualities of the human heart; but the man whose wife has just bolted with his bosom friend may be excused if he maintains that there is a time for all things, and that a goody philosophy is not the thing for him at that particular moment. On the contrary, his temporary tastes lie exactly in the opposite direction. He wants a philosophy which, without being palpably untrue, shall represent human nature in a rather odious light. He is immovably convinced that it deserves to be so represented. It is true he is angry, and disposed to generalize, and to call "all" men knaves and traitors when he should have said only "some." But who can wonder at this under the circumstances? The two specimens of the human species with whom he was most nearly related, and in whom he placed most trust, have unscrupulously deceived and betrayed him. Go and talk amiable moonshine to him, and he cannot but think you either a fool or an impostor. He may be very unphilosophical, but so are you. He ignores one set of facts; you ignore another set. He says men are liars and humbugs; you simper out that this sweeping condemnation of mankind is quite dreadful, that no man is so bad as not to have some good in him, and that the good, the noble, the generous_is what we should fix our eyes upon. probably meets your sugary platitudes with a few trenchant epigrams which men of talent have made expressly to be used on occasions of this sort. The enunciation of these biting truths is a delicious relief to him. As, Caligula wished for a humanity with one neck which he might luxuriously twist at his leisure, so the furious husband longs to say something that will pierce and slay and scarify all men (and all women, too, for the matter of that) with one fell epigram. Compact cynical remarks like those of Rochefoucauld are exactly what he wants. And when you object to his free use of them, you are likely to be losing your pains unless you can prove that he had no wife, that she did not run away from him, and that his best friend did not take her. That is to say, unless you expunge from existence certain manifest notorious facts known to you and to him and all the world, it is idle to exclaim against that peculiar class of aphorisms which collect and condense these facts into a small compass fit for daily use. He As regards the particular specimen of cynical remark with which we startednamely, that men generally do not like to see very great and, as they think, unde |