sat at the door and sold tickets to the exhibition, and it was a chilly sort of pleasure in winter time. She also helped him in the line of his art. He put his wife in a tabledrawer, a large table-drawer; then she crawled into the back part of the drawer, and so was not in the front part,-quite an optical illusion to the audience. But one evening when he drew the drawer out, she was also out of sight to him: she was not in the front drawer, not in the back one either, not in the house itself-nowhere to be seen or heardthat was her feat of legerdemain, her entertainment. She never came back again; she was tired of it all, and he grew tired of it, lost his good-humor, could not laugh or make jokes; and so the people stopped coming, his earnings became scanty, his clothes gave out; and finally he only owned a great flea, which his wife had left him, and so he thought highly of it. And he dressed the flea and taught it to perform, to present arms and to fire a cannon off,-but it was a little

cannon.

The Professor was proud of the flea, and the flea was proud of himself; he had learned something, and had human blood, and had been besides to the largest cities, had been seen by princes and princesses, had received their high praise, and it was printed in the newspapers and on placards. Plainly it was a very famous flea and could support a Professor and his entire family.

The flea was proud and famous, and yet when he and the Professor traveled they took fourth-class carriages on the railway; they went just as quickly as the first class. They were betrothed to each other; it was a private engagement that would never come out; they never would marry, the flea would remain a bachelor and the Professor a widower. That made it balance.

"Where one has the best luck," said the Professor, "there one ought to go twice." He was a good judge of character, and that is also a science of itself. At last he had traveled over all countries except the wild ones, and so he wanted to go there. They eat Christian men there, to be sure, the Professor knew, but then he was not properly Christian and the flea was not properly a man, so he thought they might venture to travel there and have good success.

They traveled by steamship and by sailing vessel; the flea performed his tricks, and so they got a free passage on the way and arrived at the wild country. Here reigned a little Princess. She was only eight years old, but she was reigning. She had taken

away the power from her father and mother, for she had a will, and then she was extraordinarily beautiful—and rude.

Just as soon as the flea had presented arms and fired off the cannon, she was so enraptured with him that she said, "Him or nobody!" She became quite wild with love and was already wild in other ways.

"Sweet, little, sensible child!" said her own father. "If one could only first make a man of him!"

"Leave that to me, old man," said she, and that was not well said by a little Princess when talking with her father, but she was wild. She set the flea on her white hand.

"Now you are a man, reigning with me, but you shall do what I want you to, or else I'll kill you and eat the Professor." The Professor had a great hall to live in. The walls were made of sugar-cane, and he could lick them, but he was not a sweet-tooth. He had a hammock to sleep in. It was as if he were lying in a balloon, such as he had always wished for himself-that was his constant thought.

The flea lived with the Princess, sat upon her delicate hand and upon her white neck. She had taken a hair from her head and made the Professor tie it to the flea's leg, and so she kept him tied to the great red coral drop which she wore in her ear-tip. What a delightful time the Princess had, and the flea too, she thought, but the Professor was not very comfortable. He was a traveler; he liked to drive from town to town, and read about his perseverance and cleverness in teaching a flea to do what men do. But he got out of and into his hammock, lounged about and had good feeding, fresh bird's-eggs, elephant's eyes and roast giraffe. People that eat men do not live entirely on cooked men-no, that is a great delicacy.

"Shoulder of children with sharp sauce," said the Princess's mother, "is the most delicate."

The Professor was tired of it all and would rather go away from the wild land, but he must have his flea with him, for that was his prodigy, and his bread and butter. How was he to get hold of him? That was no easy matter. He strained all his wits, and then he said,

"Now I have it."

Princess's Father! grant me a favor. May I summon your subjects to present themselves before your Royal Highness? That is what is called a Ceremony in the high and mighty countries of the world.

66

"That is not quite proper," replied the Professor; "but I shall teach your wild Fathership to fire a cannon off. It goes off with a bang. One sits high up aloft, and then off it goes or down he comes."

"Let me crack it off!" said the Princess's father. But in all the land there was no cannon except the one the flea had brought, and that was so very small.

one!" said the the means.

"I will cast a bigger Professor. 66 Only give me I must have fine silk stuff, needle and thread, rope and cord, together with cordial drops for the balloon, they blow one up so easily and give one the heaves; they are what make the report in the cannon's inside.”

"By all means," said the Princess's father, and gave him what he called for. All the court and the entire population came together to see the great cannon cast. The Professor did not summon them before he had the balloon entirely ready to be filled and go up. The flea sat on the Princess's hand and looked on. The balloon was filled, it bulged out and could scarcely be held down, so violent did it become.

"I must have it up in the air before it can be

"I am not very willing to let him," said the Princess, but still she reached out and handed the flea to the Professor, who placed him on his hand.

"Let go the cords and ropes," he shouted. "Now the balloon's going." They thought he said "the cannon," and so the balloon went higher and higher, up above the clouds, far away from the wild land.

The little Princess, all the family and the people sat and waited--they are waiting still; and if you do not believe it, just take a journey to the wild land; every child there talks about the Professor and the flea, and believes that they are coming back when the cannon is cooled off; but they will not come, they are at home with us, they are in their native country, they travel on the railway, first class, not fourth; they have good success, a great balloon. body asks how they got their balloon or where it came from: they are rich folks now, quite respectable folks, indeed-the flea and the Professor !

No

The Latin Nations.

IMPROVEMENT is fairly inaugurated among the Latin nations. The terrible defeat of the French by the Prussian power has humiliated France, and cast her from her high place into a struggle for existence; and she is proving her right to live by accepting the situation, and striving to profit by the lesson of her fall. She has learned from her foe the secret of her weakness, and, laying aside the splendors of royalty, and gathering her will into popular expression, she has declared her purpose to live, and to win back to herself, by legitimate means, her ancient prestige. We confess to a pleasant disappointment in this, though, while her deposed Emperor lived, we had little faith in her persistence; and the fact that she has come out of her twenty years of Napoleonism competent to assume and discharge the duties of self-government, is one to which the dead Emperor's friends may point with gratified self-justification. That there were fatal defects in that government, events have proved; but events have not proved that those defects wrought fatal demoralization upon the people. They are still rich, notwithstanding the enormous depletions of the war;

Spain, too, after casting out her dissolute queen, and struggling through an agitated interregnum, and electing a young and alien king, finding herself by his abdication still without a ruler, has concluded to rule herself. The dignity and order which have attended this revolution show that a great change has passed over the spirit of this fiery and proud people.

We are not to forget in this connection that the young king who found no charms in power when he learned that a majority of the people did not want him, and who, against all persuasions to an opposite course, laid down his scepter in voluntary deference to the popular will, was a Latin. Nothing more manly than this act of the young Amadeus has occurred in any high place during the century; and the act cannot but have the best effect upon the people whom he has

left with their destinies in their hands. There can hardly be a question that the last five years of Spanish history have been full of instruction to the Spanish people. There has been an immense amount of democratic discussion. The rebellion against the corrup tions of court and church; the organization of a recognized and tolerated republican party, with organs and orators; the actual enlargement of conscience and the freedom of thought and press and speech, have rapidly carried the nation along to a point where it has been almost forced to the adoption of a republican form of government.

The Spanish republic, of which the best spirits of Spain have so long dreamed, is a fait accompli, and recognition and congratulation flow in toward the new government from all who are not fearful of her influence.

Italy, too, is in the way of improvement and progress-united Italy. Her cities are growing; popu lar education is attracting more and more attention; vagabondage and brigandage are decreasing; books from other lands, full of modern ideas in politics, society and morals, are being translated and circulated; and old Rome-the ancient mistress of the worldfeels the touch of a new life in every street. Schools are opened for the people, newspapers are multiplied, Protestantism is accorded the privileges which freedom bestows upon all religions, the trowel of the mason fills the air with the sound of growth and industry, and reform, moral and material, is the order of the day.

All these movements in France, Spain, and Italy reveal a vitality in the Latin nations, and a recuperative power, which are as surprising as they are gratifying to the rest of the world. The Anglo-Saxon had ceased to expect much from these races. He had looked upon them as having reached and passed the culminating period of their history and powers, and as doomed to a slow but certain decay. It is not sure that such is not the case even now, but they certainly betray signs of latent life that needs only a free growth and manifestation to reinstate them in their former glory. They have but to discard at once and forever their effete institutions, and the hindrances by which hitherto they have consented to be bound, to hold an even way with their blue-eyed neighbors in the path of development and progress. They will be watched with intense interest and hearty good-will by the American nation at least.

It is very suggestive in this connection that all the improvement among those nations is accompanied by a rebellion against the temporal sway of the Pope. Just in the proportion that they become free, and start boldly forward in the way of improvement, do they cast from them the trammels of the Church as a temporal power. It can be no secret that the man of the Vatican looks upon all these changes among the nations, where once his power was strongest and least disputed, with consternation and grief. Queen Isabella, the vile, was the wearer of his rose. Louis Napoleon held him on his temporal throne by the presence

and menace of his bayonets. The troops of Victor Emanuel marched into Rome as the French retired, and stripped the Pope of his temporal kingdom. Re ligious orders that fattened on the industries of the people, and intrigued against the State, are suppressed. Just in the proportion that the people advance, and claim their right to order their own destinies, does the sway of Rome decline; and nothing is more certain than that it will decline more and more as the people improve in culture and in self-government. The time must soon come when Church and State will be separated in all those countries, and the quicker the better. The same fact is just as evident in Protestant England as it is in Catholic Italy and France. The connection is unnatural, and always was unnatu ral. It not only corrupts religion but destroys the liberty of the State and the people. The true and only legitimate sway of Christianity is a spiritual sway, and the quicker all the nations realize this, and all religious authorities accept it, the earlier will the people achieve freedom and progress, and the Church, of whatever name, accomplish its triumph. Christianity was intended to be a free force in civilization,-to permeate by its spirit all nations and governments, and not to assume temporal domination over them, or to enter into entangling alliances with them. shall watch with special interest and anxiety the movements of these struggling nations, with reference to this matter of freeing themselves from a power-seeking church, because these movements will indicate with certainty either their progress toward freedom and national improvement, or their failure both to grasp the facts of their position and to accept the offer of their grand opportunities.

Clean Hands.

We

THE world moves. It is not so respectable as it was a few years ago to be a rascal. People are learning the lesson that clean hands are desirable, both for personal comfort and pleasant social intercourse. They really seem to be learning that purity pays, and that personal honor and incorruptibleness are a good investment. Rogues and rings are having a tough time. of it, and it is their own fault if the young and ambi tious men who are now coming upon the stage of action do not learn to place so high a price upon themselves that neither wealth nor power can buy them.

The rascalities of the New York King are all exposed, and the members of that Ring have either run away, or are staggering before public opinion and the law, disgraced and degraded men. Bribery in Congress stands exposed and rebuked, while names that were pure have received a tarnish that can never be polished away. Men who have held their heads high in the nation, bow those heads in shame over hands which are soiled beyond cleansing. We call no names, but, scattered up and down the land, great reputations lie in ruins. Men who had wealth which they stole, and men who had positions which they

bought, and men who used their public office to push their private schemes, are thrown high and dry out of influence, and lie all exposed upon the rocks of disgrace, where they are sure to rot or go to pieces.

If the young politicians of the country will learn the lesson that the facts which we have recounted are so well calculated to teach, better times for the country lie in the future. Personal advantage is a mean motive to appeal to, where so vital a question as personal purity is concerned, but, as there is no danger to morals from any other appeal, it is well to meet temp. tation on its own ground and fight it with its own weapons. The lesson of the recent exposures is really needed by none but those who fancy that they can compass their ends best by base means; and if these shall learn from it that, in the long run, nothing pays so well in wealth and power and safety and comfort as virtue, they will learn that which will be of incalculable benefit to them and to the country. money was ever won by treachery to trust that did not harm the winner. No power was ever achieved by bribery or retained by falsehood that did not scorch the palm of him who held it. The consciousness of ill-desert, the loss of self-respect, the fear of exposure and the self-commitment to a life of deception, which go always with possessions unworthily won, are poison in the blood, and the exposure, sooner or later, is as sure to come as death.

Lord Lytton.

No

ONE of the most striking and memorable statements made by Mr. MacDonald, in his recent lecture on Robert Burns, was, that the first grand requisite of a poet is a heart. No matter how brilliant a man's intellect may be, no matter how high and fine his culture, no matter how cunning and careful his art, if he have not a heart that brings him not only into sympathy with his kind, but with all life of plant and animal, and all life of God as it breathes through, and is manifested in, inanimate nature, the essential qualification of the poet is wanting. This proposition may stand as a canon of criticism by right of its own self-evident truthfulness, no less than by the testimony of all literary history. A thousand brilliant men have risen and passed away, attracting wide attention while they lived, but warming and fructifying no mind by their light, and expiring at last like a burnt-out star, leaving no trace in the sky. So near the earth were they, that their light failed at once when the fountain failed, while many a lesser star, by burning nearer heaven, has been able to send down its rays for centuries after its fires were extinguished.

Lord Lytton had what may be called a very successful literary life, and, politically and socially, was a power in his day and generation. He had wealth, he had position, he had a marvelous culture, he had fame, he had great industry, he held the curious eye and the attentive ear of the world, he had an imperious ambition, he had something more than talent,-gifts

which only needed the talismanic touch of love to make them genius,--he had everything but the one thing needful to make him a poet. That one needful thing was a heart. No man ever accused or suspected him of possessing anything that could bear so precious a name. His neighbors tell us that he was a bad man ; his wife affirms the same fact; and all that he has left to us of his enormous literary work sustains their personal testimony. Marvelous jewelry of thought and fancy has he bequeathed to us—beautiful shams in beautiful settings-but there is no blood in his rubies: there is no heaven in his sapphires; and all his diamonds are "off color." As the grave closes over his body, the mantle of oblivion falls-gracefully and golden-fringedover his works. He has a place in history; his works stand in long rows upon many a library shelf in his own and other lands; but Lord Lytton is dead, and his works are nearly so. They enter no more into the life of the world. They never did enter into the life of the world as a beneficent power. Were it not for two or three plays which still hold to the boards, he, with all his works, would be as dead to-day as Julius Cæsar. We give elsewhere in this magazine what we believe to be a generous critique of his works; but we wish to speak here of that grand cause of his failure which existed in his constitution and personal charac

'ter.

Simple Bobby Burns, with morals hardly less offensive than his of whom we write, goes singing down the centuries, and making music through the silence that shrouds the memory of our titled littérateur. It is not because he was good, or pure, or true even to himself, but because he was in sympathy with life, and did not sit and sing, poised in the superb selfishness from which Lord Lytton addressed the world. He loved nature, he loved mankind, he entered sympathetically into human trial and trouble; he hated oppression, he despised cant, he respected and defended manhood, and with all his weaknesses, over which he mourned and with which he struggled, he revered Christian goodness. The high and the humble recognize him as a brother. In brief, he had a heart, and without that heart all his wonderful gifts would have availed him nothing. Without that heart, and its manifestation in song, his name would long since have been forgotten, and the poetry he left would have been swept away among the vulgar trash of earlier and coarser times.

The same thing may be said, only less emphatically, of Dickens. The personal character of Dickens can hardly be regarded as admirable, even by those who loved him most; yet he had a heart which brought him into sympathy with all those phases of humanity which were intellectually interesting to him. He loved the rascals whom he painted, and enjoyed the society of the weakest men and women of his pages; and it is this sympathy which gives immortality to his novels. Pickwick and David Copperfield are as fresh to-day as when they were written, and are sure to be read by many generations yet to come; yet the

learning, culture, and position of the man-his gifts and acquirements and art-were all inferior to those of Lord Lytton. His superiority was in his heart and his sympathy, and on these he stands far above his titled contemporary in the popular regard. Bulwer is a name whose home is in catalogues and biographical dictionaries. Dickens is a man whom the people love. One is a memory; the other a living and abiding presence.

No poet or novelist can greatly benefit the world who does not become the object of popular affection; and this popular affection cannot be secured without the manifestation of sympathy. We need hardly add to this, that no poet or novelist can secure a personal regard for his works who, in some way, does not benefit the world. Yet in this day we have an im mense amount of talk about art as independent of all moral quality or purpose. Legitimate art, we are told, is creation-the work of the brain—and may be excellent, independent of moral quality. Beauty of structure, beauty of detail, harmony of parts-these are the points discussed, and these are the points relied upon to establish excellence. All these we find in Bulwer. He had no superior as an artist in this sense among his contemporaries, yet his works are practically dead. There was no lack of power in the man, but there was a lack of that quality which was necessary to bring him inside the better sympathies of human nature. No art emanating from supreme selfishness can ever command a permanent place in the world. Heartless art is loveless art, useless art, dead art. Fine art without fine feeling is a rose without fragrance. Poetry without sympathy bears the same relation to true poetry that the music of the orchestrion, turned by a water-wheel, bears to that of the violin, singing or moaning in the passionate hands of a master.

Lord Lytton passes away, and no man stops his neighbor in the street to speak of it. He lived the splendid, selfish life he chose to live; he was the admired, the petted, the courted, the titled, the rich man of literature; but his fame was as heartless and loveless as himself. No worthy man covets his name and fame. No young man finds in him virtues to emulate, or excellences to inspire. No man finds in his work the stimulus to purity, to nobleness, to goodness. He lived to his autumn, but his fruit, brought to premature beauty by the worms it bred, rots where it fell, and his leaves, brilliant with many dyes, fall at the touch of the frost, to be trodden under foot or swept away by the wind.

Party Virtue.

THE vote in the House of Representatives at Washington, a few weeks ago, by which that body refused the appointment of a committee to prepare articles of impeachment against the Vice-President of the United States, was one of the most unpleasantly suggestive votes ever recorded in this country. Either the Vice-President was evidently deserving of so

high a proceeding against him, or he was not. There was not a fact of his case which was not as wel known to one member as another. There was not a member of that body, unless he had deliberately chosen to be ignorant, who had not come to an intelligent conclusion concerning the Vice-President's guilt or innocence of the charges that had been preferred against him. It was a plain question of fact, on which an unbiased jury of ordinary intelligence could have had no difficulty in coming to a just conclusion; yet one of the highest deliberative bodies in the land voted upon it, almost exclusively according to party prejudices and affiliations. Half a dozen republicans, whose motives, at least, were open to suspicion, voted with the solid array of democratic members against the Vice-President, while the republicans, as an overwhelming and controlling majority, declared by their vote that that officer had done nothing to deserve the disgrace sought to be inflicted.

The country is thus left in doubt as to the real merits of the case, and knows no more concerning them from this vote than it would from the decision of a debating-club of boys. One of these parties has evidently lied, or borne false witness for or against a man hitherto considered eminent for his personal virtues.

It is sad to conclude that so high a body as the House of Representatives is entirely untrustworthy in its dealings with a question of public morality and personal rectitude. The country may well ask, in view of this vote: "If they do these things in the green tree, what will they do in the dry?" If such vital questions as the incorruptibleness and veracity of one of the heads of the government is to be settled by a party vote in the House of Representatives, what are we to conclude concerning the whole Crédit Mobilier investigation? Indeed, is it not fair to judge that this investigation was a "put-up job," intended exclusively for political purposes? A delightful set of men, these, to pass upon the moral standing of each other, when the guilt of doing it in accordance with party inter ests is blacker than anything charged against any one of them! Ay, a pretty set of men, these, who stand self-recorded as maligners or defenders of a public reputation and a private character, according to party prejudices, to pass judgment upon the moral standing of their fellows! We protest that, whether the mea implicated by this investigation are guilty or not, the men into whose hands the investigation fell convicted themselves of their moral unfitness to settle it justly. We have lost all faith in the investigation and its results. We do not believe the country knows, after all the reports, who the guilty ones are, or that it ever will know. Each party, it seems to us, has simply tried to see how much it could make or save out of it; and the poor devils who have come from the scrimmage with soiled linen and unpleasant adjectives aftached to their names, will at least have the comfort of knowing that the country thinks as much of them as of the most of those by whose party votes they were defended or condemned.