mortal men with mops, who spring-, rich noblemen and noblewomen, flower clean within these cider mansions at the dry season. For since there are two thousand throats in the convent, even to the greatest cider-cask cometh every two months a dry season. In time we reach the quarters of the women lunatics-airy rooms and corridors smelling of much soap and more summer air. For the milder paupers are little dormitories, plainly furnished with some half-dozen white-winged beds, and the warder sister's stronghold tucked into the alcove next the peepholed door. The paying patients have their one or two private rooms, prettily furnished: here easy-chairs and costly hangings, there a lace-draped bed for the lady, and for the wild beast who occasionally gets the upper hand, lo! a strongly barred berth, where the beast may tear and worry and hurt nought till it becomes a lady again. "Do you admit Protestants?" curiosity asks of one of the sisters. "Why, surely-if they are mad!" she answers sweetly. More corridors, more white beds, more warder religieuses, and at last out through locked entrances on to the roof, whence we look down on all Anne Leroy's city and a good deal of William the Norman's too. The "little convent" lies below, buildings and flowers and trees and walls, variously dight lunatics and darkly draped religieuses, chapel roofs and the crosses of two graveyards, tiny chateaux for gardens for them, aviaries, fountains, carefully guarded fishponds, all of miniature delight that can be devised. Just at our feet is the pleasure-ground of the women lunatics, rendered fourfold by high walls. In one division the rich ladies lounge in low chairs amidst gorgeous flower-beds; in another women of a lower class take their ease a trifle less luxuriously, or pace up and down in the shade. The other twain are for the paupers. In the first of these movements cease not, feet wag on the gravel, fingers drum, heads nod unmeaningly; there is no quiet there. They are the ever-restless, separated from the more placid variety lest all should become restless. But in the last garden there is peace. Figures sit under the trees like logs, desire seems to have failed, a voice seldom breaks the quiet of the peopled lime-walk. There is sunshine round them, greenery over their heads; but they sit on dumbly, their eyes vacantly gazing, doomed to be mere existences in a world that lives. And we lift our eyes from the sadnesses of Anne Leroy's noble charity and the great unfolding walls, and outside spreads the racecourse, flecked with flags and hurdles, and beyond all the shivering heat of distance and the serrated squadrons of poplars, looking like giant ghosts of the old Northmen marching to battle. Glass Bricks.-Talconnier's blown glass bricks, which should not be confounded with the solid blocks of glass formerly used with little success for similar purposes, are very light and strong. They are, in fact, hollow chambers, so shaped as to facilitate their being put together like other building blocks, and are laid so as to present an ornamental appearance. Made in this fashion the bricks fill successfully the part of double windows with an air-chamber encased in a double glass wall, and they are consequently an efficient preservation against cold as well as against heat, and good insulators of dampness and noise. The bricks are hermetically sealed while yet hot, thereby preventing foreign substances or dust from soiling the interior, and they are then annealed to increase their powers of resistance. The laying of the bricks is plain bricklayers' work, the vaults being constructed over a centre of wood. heavy lime mortar or light cement mixed with fine sand being used after the whole width of the joint around the brick has been covered with a layer of sizing of a light tint that can be varied according to taste, so as to obtain nice effects of changing colors if desired. The glass bricks, it is said, are used with good results in the construction of greenhouses and conservatories, as they retain the stored heat for a long time; consequently a considerable economy of fuel is realized. Railway Review. GREAT BRITAIN? By the Earl of Meath, Nineteenth Century, . Longman's Magazine, 269 279 295 Gentleman's Magazine, 305 Temple Bar, 310 315 For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents. IN THE VALLEY. If a ghost may indeed come back, And wander once more Along the familiar track, To the old house door, At full of the moon I shall come When the sheaves have been carried home I shall stand in the moonbeams chill, I shall watch where the steep of the hill At full of the moon shall I hear, As I watch and wait, Shall I hear a step draw near To the garden gate, And out of the shadowy gloom Of the great elm-tree, Will my old lover once more come To keep tryst with me? From The National Review. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.1 Few modern writers have roused a stronger feeling of personal affection than O.W. Holmes. His friends, known and unknown, have naturally looked forward to a life which might be complementary to the autobiography implicitly contained in his writings. Mr. Morse, to whom it has fallen to supply this want, apologizes by anticipation for partially disappointing their expectations. They will ask, he thinks, for more correspondence, and his answer is the very conclusive one that more correspondence is not forthcoming. Dr. Holmes, it appears, disliked letterwriting; and, although he systematically replied to hosts of unknown admirers, wrote comparatively little to his own circle of intimates. The unknown admirers appear to have kept his answers to themselves, considering them as autographs or literary curiosities not to be dignified as "letters." I certainly regret with Mr. Morse that more of these documents have not been sent to him. He might have formed from them a book which I have often desiderated-a model letter-writer for the use of editors. It would have been exceedingly welcome. The problem how to tell a young author plainly that his rhymes are rubbish, and yet give no pain to an innocent aspirant, has weighed upon the souls of many sitters in the critical chair. A young author once showed me letters from two of the most distinguished men of the time, one of whom, while not committing himself, somehow suggested that he might be addressing the coming Shakespeare; while the other roundly declared that most lads had put better work in their waste-paper basket. They meant much the same thing, and Dr. Holmes was one of the few men who might have fused the two letters and combined the courtesy with the wholesome truth. I, for one, should 1 Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell olmes. By John T. Morse, Jun., author of "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," etc. With Portraits, Facsimiles, and other Illustrations. 2 vols., crown 8vo, 900 pp., cloth extra, gilt top, 18s. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. have been glad to have had the secret communicated, or, at least, a few examples given of the method. It is some comfort to one who has failed to be told that even Holmes's good-nature was sometimes requited with abuse. In any case, as Mr. Morse has not the materials, his excuse is unanswerable. One good result is that the life is given in two volumes of modest size; and for the record or so simple a history that seems to be ample. We do not, perhaps, know very much more than an attentive reader could infer from Dr. Holmes's own writings; but the facts are brought together in a definite and authentic shape, and combined in a simple and agreeable narrative. Every reader of the "Autocrat" has his own distinct image of the author. As he remarks himself in a characteristic passage, there are three people on each side of every dialogue; the real John, and John's ideal John, and Peter's John; and no doubt there may be a real Holmes, different from the Holmes of Holmes's own imagination and the reader's Holmes. There are, however, very few people of whom one believes that the three have a more substantial identity. The true man, as every one remarks, shows himself with all his idiosyncrasies in every page of his writing. This suggests certain difficulties for the writer. Mr. Morse observes that the true Holmes was a New Englander "from the central thread of his marrow to his outermost rind." That is undeniable; but Mr. Morse proceeds to answer that nagging critic, who is invisibly present whenever one writes, and who hereupon suggests that Holmes was provincial. Mr. Morse replies that no creative writer, except Shakespeare, who has been cosmopolitan has also made himself a "place in the hearts of mankind." I should myself begin by denying that Shakespeare was an exception. Nobody, surely, ever reflected more fully and faithfully the great imaginative movement of his own time; and, if we knew the people of Stratford-on-Avon and the frequenters of the Globe Theatre as we know the people of Scott's Edinburgh, I sus His characteristic nationality has, however, one result; namely, that in criticising Holmes one seems to be criticising New England or the United States. That is always a little awkward for an Englishman. To speak of Americans is to steer between two opposite difficulties. One fears to fall into the old tone, when poor Mrs. Trollope and the critics of her day roused all the wrath of the democrat under the sneers of kid-gloved gentility, while, on the opposite side, there are certain commonplaces about Shakespeare and community of race, which are not precisely true, and are apt to be flung back contemptuously in one's face. There is a more personal difficulty for such Englishmen as have received the hospitality of the society which Holmes frequented. Those to whom the name recalls the actual presence or the vivid memory of Emerson and Hawthorne and Longfellow and Lowell, can hardly trust themselves to speak with due critical coolness. A writer, especially one who has many recollections, which, for good reasons, he is unwilling to manufacture into "reminiscences," almost feels his tongue tied. I think of a young gentleman who, in the heat of the Civil War, was most courteously welcomed by the men I have mentioned. and who is half afraid to give full utterance to feelings which might seem overstrained, and yet equally anxious not to appear deficient in warmth of gratitude. I will, however, venture to make a few of the remarks about Holmes which are suggested by this biography; though I am not quite sure whether the vividness of certain very pleasant memories is a qualification or the reverse. pect that we should recognize the Shallows and the Falstaffs of the plays as clearly as we recognize Scott's friends in the Waverley Novels. Or to drop Shakespeare, who is apt, I sometimes fancy, to intrude a little too often, was there ever any one who was at once more full of personal and local idiosyncrasies, and at the same time more thoroughly "cosmopolitan," than Montaigne?-one of the numerous list of authors to whom, as Mr. Morse reminds us, Holmes has been compared. A man surely need not cease to be cosmopolitan because he is provincial, any more than he ceases to be an athlete because he plays the game of his countrycricket in England and base-ball in America. What interests us in the sport is the display of strength and activity which may be shown in one game as well as another. The great writer is great because he displays a powerful intellect or a vivid imagination, and does not cease to be great because he applies his reasoning to particular questions or casts his imagery into the artistic mould of the day. There are obvious dangers in "provincialism." A man shut up in a village may be ignorant of the thoughts that are stirring outside; he may express himself in a dialect unintelligible to the larger world, or his mind may be atrophied for want of collision and excitement, and he may therefore limit | himself to trifles interesting to a petty circle alone. But every man has got to be incarnate at a particular time and place, and to apply his mind to the questions which are stirring there. Holmes was not the less a New Englander because he was also an individual; nor the less a citizen of the great world because he belonged to this I have said that Holmes's career was particular province. The New England singularly simple. He was born in of his day, whatever its limitations, 1809, and passed a long life almost conwas seething with important move-tinuously at Boston and the immediate ments as interesting, in slightly differ- neighborhood, his only long absence ent applications, on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the other; and the fact that Holmes looked at them from a New England point of view does not show that he did not appreciate their wider significance. being caused by two years of medical studies at Paris. On returning he set up as a physician without obtaining much practice. He married in 1840, in 1847 became professor in the medical school at Harvard, and held the office |