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to become, by silence, a participator in the outrages going on around him, had very nearly destroyed, at least for the time, his weight and influence at home." So that from a little, and at first insignificant body of men, aided by the printing-press, such great consequences had arisen. Small tracts and papers from their press had made slavery the question du jour. It was these tracts that had thrown the whole south planters, politicians, merchants, lawyers, divines, into an agony of terror, a terror with which even the people of the north so far sympathized, as to be ready to trample under foot, for the extinction of these horrible innovators, every safeguard of liberty hitherto esteemed the most sacred. Free speaking and free writing were not to be any longer tolerated. Throughout the United States, so far as related to the subject of slavery, they were to be suppressed by mob violence.

Cincinnati itself had borne, as we have said, a very prominent part in favour of abolition, but the discussion was felt to be dangerous, and though once encouraged by the President of Lane Seminary, he at last felt it incumbent on him to endeavour to put a stop to it. It was too late. The discussion still continued, and the anti-abolitionists increased in number and in violence. Slave owners came over from Kentucky, and urged on the mob to violence, and for some time there was a danger of Lane Seminary, and the houses of Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe, being burned or pulled down. At last the Board of Trustees interfered, and abolitionist discussions were strictly forbidden. To this necessary rule, the students gave a singularly laconic reply, by withdrawing en masse. The seminary was deserted, or but a handfull of pupils left. The great object of the lives of Professor Stowe and Dr. Beecher entirely overthrown. For several years afterwards these faithful teachers still remained, endeavouring to raise the fallen academy, and to bring back some little of its prosperity; but in 1850, Dr. Beecher retired, and Professor Stowe gave up the fruitless attempt, and accepted the chair of Biblical Literature in the theological seminary at Andover, Massachusetts- an institution which stands," says a contemporary, "to say the least, as high as any in the United States.".

We have now seen that, by this period, Mrs. Stowe must have become fully aware of the workings of slavery, and most have known from her own maternal feelings how slave-mothers felt, when their offspring was taken from them. She had lost children, herself, and in the true spirit of "Non ignara mali miseris succurrere diseo," she had gifted the oppressed slave with feelings as poignant as her own. She was right. Those who have of late decried her book, have presumed that the negro's affection is unnaturally blunted, and that a finer education educes feelings, which, in less civilized natures, do not exist. Such reasoning is both dangerous and false. Relying upon it, nothing great was ever done. Acting upon a knowledge to the exact contrary, by appealing to the finer feelings of the mobile vulgus, Cicero succeeds; and Cæsar, addressing the honor, touching to the quick that sense, in an otherwise brutal and revolted soldiery, quells a tumult with two words-"Ego, quirites." It is useless to multiply examples: the universal voice has ap plauded, not condemned; and the coming years will endorse in bold characters the opinion of to-day.

Arrived at this point; this 1850, the most remarkable portion of the life of the authoress is reached. Her soul had revolted at the cruelties she had witnessed; and expression was not denied her. She had a plain tale to tell-one of suffering and endurance; and she told it. The very modesty and quietness of the appeal gave it a redoubled force; the mute look of the mendicant has more power than the urgent voice; the veiled face of Agamemnon bespeaks grief more deeply than the falling tear.

So that, when in that year, busy enough, and preparing for the coming fair of the world, the simple chapters of a simple tale first appeared in the "Washington National Era," there were ready ears to listen, and plenty willing to mark its teachings. Each successive number added to its strength and fame; but at first that fame grew but slowly. It is always so; and it is quite a mistake to suppose that any work of genius ever bursts suddenly upon the eye. They calculate the appearance of comets now-a-days, and give shrewd surmises upon Le Ver

riers planet. When the weekly issue in the columns of the paper were at an end, there was, however an universal call for its re-appearance before the curtain. And it came. Then came the shout of applause, the clapping of hands, the rising in the pit, the tears, cheers, laughter, and wild excitement; and the book was made. Critics absolutely seem to have lost themselves in reviewing it as much as the ordinary readers. They pronounced it at once "the story of the age," and one declares "that a hundred thousand families were either every day bathed in tears, or moved to laughter by the work."

Such eulogies strike our English ears as peculiarly American and vulgar; and they, moreover, by their extravagance, injure the book. We naturally suspect those wares which are too extravagantly cried up. We fancy the chapman has some extra per centage for being so voluble. The Quarterlies, we know, cannot afford so much praise, and we know also that certain country papers, happily not the whole, keep certain praiseful paragraphs in type, ready upon emergency for any work whatever. So hereon people grew suspicious, but "Uncle Tom's Cabin" stood the storm, and increased in fame, even under such friends; but these puffs excited the hostility of some of the better portion of the press; the writers of which were annoyed in the same way that Hazlitt was by the perpetual talk upon the "Pickwick Club." Even now, when the "row" is subsiding, we can point to more than one literary man of high standing and known ability, who had not read the book, having, by the means we have enumerated, conceived a prejudice against it.

The insinuations of the "Times," and other papers, against "Uncle Tom's Cabin," appear to us to bear an almost interested aspect. There is very little doubt but that the purest motives in the world, were they propounded openly, would find some to deny and impugn them. If the philosophic Pliny could have believed, and have transmitted to us, accusations of so deep a dye against the earlier Christians; if their meetings for the purpose of celebrating our Lord's supper, could be reported to be but a licentious assemblage, for the indulgence of the worst passions which disfigure huma

nity, how shall we wonder that in our own time we find men too ready to deny what is good, and to credit what is evil in humanity?

Besides this, there is a very great feeling in literary men against the too near approach of what is called evangelical religion. The celebrated John Foster has, in his Essays, noticed this. It has, for instance, a language peculiarly its own. Classical quotation, Dr. Johnson has told us, is the parôle of literary men, and it is true; no less true is it that biblical quotations and biblical phrases are the parôle of the lower classes of deep and earnest religionists, and just as much at this time as they were in the time of Cromwell and the elder Puritans. They have no other literature than the sacred pages of the Bible. Their mind has nothing to obliterate its deep and earnest teachings, and the very sympathy they feel with the trials of St. Paul, and the deep contrition of David gives them in the time of their trouble, a language which clothes their ideas in an eastern imagery, which is unsuited to the nature or idiom of our colder tongue. To them no teacher has said :"I nunc et versus, tecum meditare canoros."

in bitter allusion to the nonsense of the schools; for them Homer, even as a translation, is a sealed book; nor are they acquainted with the polished sarcasms of Pope, or the glittering heartlessness of Chesterfield or Rochefoucauld.

Consequently their language becomes, as we have said, essentially biblical. The hypocrite observes this, and, seeking no further, he adopts this language as a cloak to his villainy, nay, he is so much the more earnest, voluble, and fluent, in such a tongue, in exactly the inverse ratio of his want of real belief and godliness.

Hence such language has become hateful to the world, and those who use it are for the most part condemned at once as hypocrites and knaves; and this is almost enough to excite a feeling of opposition against a work which contains a hero who is a type of the puritanism of which we have spoken. Taking this into consideration, we shall at once see how it is that the chief character of her book has been pronounced "too good," and overdrawn. There is yet another reason.

Great Britain, as a nation of traders, has an immense interest in a perfect peace with America; and when it is known that that republic is our best customer, the simplest intellect will understand why it would be unwise to irritate her. A great part of this trade is confined to the slave-holding states, and in exchange for negrogrown cotton, sugar, and rice; textile and hardware manufactures are sent out in great quantities. Abolish slavery, and for a time at least the supply ceases, and probably the relations of the two nations would become entangled. The "Times," ever far-sighted, saw this, and it is possible that in this way the views of the writer were biassed. Consequently Mrs. Stowe's work was pronounced to be extremely exaggerated and mischievous. In her last new preface she has met these general accusations, and, as it is new to the reader, and an answer from the author herself, we print it here:

"That great mystery which all Christian nations hold in commonthe union of God with man, through the humanity of Jesus Christ-invests human existence with an awful sacredness; and in the eye of the true believer in Jesus, he who tramples on the rights of his meanest fellow-man is not only inhuman, but sacrilegious; and the worst form of this sacrilege is the institution of slavery.

"It has been said that the representations of this book are exaggerations. Would that this were true!-would this book were indeed a fiction, and not a close-wrought mosaic of fact! But that it is not a fiction, the proofs lie bleeding in thousands of hearts they have been attested by responding voices from almost every slave state, and from slave-owners themselves, with express reference to the representations of this book. If more is wanting, we can point the whole civilised world to the written published slave-code of the southern states, where may be seen a calm, clear, legal crystallization and arrangement of every enormity and every injustice which despotic power can inflict on the soul and body of a fellow-man.

Let any

man read the laws, and he will never doubt the results.

"Since so it is, thanks be to God that this mighty cry, this wail of an unutterable anguish, has at last been heard!

"It has been said that the slavepopulation of America is a degraded race, utterly unprepared for and incapable of freedom, and that such characters as are described in this book are not to be found among them. Whatever may be true of the pure African race, it is a fact that the majority of the slave-population of America are a mixed race, in whose veins is circulating the blood of their op pressors; and characters such as that of George Harris and Eliza are not unfrequently found among them. Lest the character of Uncle Tom be considered merely a creation, with no type in reality, the author places beside it the following description of a favourite slave, from the published will of Judge Upshur, late Secretary of State, under the administration of President Tyler:

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"I hereby emancipate and set free my servant, David Rice, and direct my executors to give him one hundred dollars. I recommend him, in the strongest manner, to the respect, esteem, and confidence, of any community in which he may happen to live. He has been my slave for twenty-four years, during all which time he has been trusted to every extent and in every respect. My confidence in him has been unbounded; his relations to myself and family have always been such as to afford him daily opportunities to deceive and injure us, and yet he has never been detected in any serious fault, or even in an unintentional breach of the decorum of his station. intelligence is of a high order- his sense of right and propriety correct, and even refined. I feel that he is justly entitled to carry this certificate from me in the new relations which he must now form; it is due to his long and most faithful services, and to the sincere and steady friendship which I bear him; in the uninterrupted and confidential intercourse of twenty-four years, I have never given nor had occasion to give him one unpleasant word. I know no man who has fewer faults or more excellences than he."

His

"Such a character, of course, is not common, either in fiction or fact; but so much of degradation, obloquy, and of enforced vice, has been heaped upon the head of the unhappy African, that he is in justice entitled to the very fairest representation which may consist with probability and fact.

"It is not in utter despair, but in solemn hope and assurance, that the friends of freedom may regard the struggle that now convulses America. It is the outcry of the demon of slavery, which has heard the voice of a coming Jesus, and is rending the noble form from which at last he will bid it depart.

"It cannot be that so monstrous a solecism can long exist in the bosom of a nation which in all other respects is the best exponent of the principles of universal brotherhood. In America, the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Hungarian, the Swede, and the Celt, all mingle on terms of fraternity and equal right. All nations there display their characteristic excellence, and are admitted by her liberal laws to equal privileges; everything there is tending to liberalize, humanize, and elevate; and for that very reason it is that the contest with slavery there grows every year more terrible. The stream of human progress, widening, deepening, strengthening, from the confluent forces of all nations, meets this barrier, behind which is concentrated the ignorance, oppression, and cruelty of the dark ages: it roars and foams, now at its base, but every year it has been steadily rising, till at last, with a rush like Niagara, it will sweep the barrier away. "In its commencement, slavery overspread every state in the union. The progress of society has already emancipated a majority of the states from its yoke. In Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, at different times, strong movements have been made for emancipation, movements enforced by a comparison of the progressive march of the free states, with the poverty and sterility induced by a system which in a few years exhausts the resources of the soil without the power of renewal. The time cannot be distant when these states must emancipate for self-preservation: and if no new slave territory be added, the increase of slave population will enforce measures of emancipation in the remainder.

"Here, then, is the point of the battle. Unless new slave territory is gained, slavery dies-if it is gained, it lives. Around this point political parties fight and manœuvre, and every year the battle waxes hotter.

"The internal struggles of no other nation in the world can be so interesting to Europeans as those of America; for America is fast filling up from Europe, and every European who lands on her shores has almost immediately his vote in her councils.

"If, therefore, the oppressed of other nations desire to find in America an asylum of permanent freedom, let them come prepared, heart, hand, and vote, against the institution of slavery, for they who cuslave others cannot long themselves remain free. True are the great living words of Kossuth"No nation can remain free with whom freedom is a privilege and not a principle."

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Owing to the still unsettled state of the copyright question, certain London booksellers have a kind of advanced guard established who are on the watch for novelties of value in the book way published on the other side of the water, which are then sent off, (posted wet from the press) and make their appearance over here as a new book, by which pleasant and equitable arrangement, the author gets nothing for his copyright, and the " enterprising publisher" is entirely secured from loss by undertaking only the works of such authors as have undergone the ordeal of publication and approval before another and critical public. It is but fair to state, and we do it in order to prevent our booksellers from getting all the praise due to this generous act, that the Americans were the first to begin, and are those mostly benefited, by such arrangements. Our Quarterlies and best magazines are reprinted by the Harpers (we were about to write harpies), as well as the works of our best authors.

Under such existing circumstances, we find it stated in an extraordinary advertisement, of an inflated nature, that Mr. Bogue, of Fleet Street, got the first copy of "Uncle Tom," which went the round of the trade without any purchaser. The reader will probably recollect that "Robinson Crusoe" did the same. "At last," says our authority, "a very reputable printer got hold of it, and sat up half the night reading it; then woke up his wife, who read it too, and was moved to tears thereby, whereon the printer, like Molière, who judged of his comedies by the effect they had upon

his old nurse, declared it was good, and forthwith published it.

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Let not the reader think such anecdotes puerile. Boswell, (or Mrs. Thrale) have carefully packed up, and sent down to posterity the epitaph of the nine years old Johnson on,

"Good Master Duck,

That Samuel Johnson trod on

the slightest degree towards the removal of the gigantic evil that afflicts her soul, is a point upon which we may express the greatest doubt; nay, is a matter upon which, unfortunately, we have very little doubt at all, inasmuch as we are certain, that the very readiest way to rivet the fetters of slavery, in these critical times, is to direct against

If he had lived and had been good luck, all slaveholders in America, the oppro

For then we'd had an odd 'un."

brium and indignation which such works as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' are sure And some may be curious to know to excite.... The gravest fault of the upon how slender a thread, the popu- book has, however, to be mentioned. larity of a very famous novel depended. Its object is to abolish slavery. Its But however veracious the advertise-effect will be to render slavery more ment may have been, certain it is, that the book lay comparatively still for nearly five months, and then the editions multiplied as fast as night-worked compositors and steam-power could make them. We are afraid to say how many there have been. They are of all prices from sixpence to ten and sixpence already, and one is advertised at a guinea. Looked at in a merely utilitarian point of view, the labour and employment, which that single production of a single mind, has created has been immense. The families of printers, type-founders, paper-makers, binders and artists have reason to

thank it.

But we cannot go into the history of editions, printed in type as fine as Elzevirs, or as ragged as that of Catnach, with the book we have to do as an emanation from Mrs. Stowe, and as the central point of interest in her biography. The "Times" was astonished at the popularity of the work, and thought it worthy of a critique.

Now the critic or critics of the "Times" have peculiar minds. No one scarcely ever agrees with them, they are not generally clever, but from their position they have a certain weight, and they produce "reverberated thunder" elsewhere. The position that the critic took, in this instance, was a guarded one. The recent Fishery dis pute had made the English fear a dis turbance of peace between America and England, and the "Times" wrote, therefore, on the safe side of the question. It carried with it the quietsts of the country.

"That she will convince the world of the purity of her own motives, and of the hatefulness of the sin she denounces is equally clear; but that she will help in

difficult than ever of abolishment. Its very popularity constitutes its greatest difficulty. It will keep ill-blood at boiling point, and irritate instead of pacifying those, whose proceedings Mrs. Stowe is anxious to influence on behalf of humanity." The review concludes in the following words, "Liberia, and similar spots on the earth's surface, proffer aid to the South, which cannot be rejected with safety. That the aid may be accepted with alacrity and good heart, let us have no more Uncle Tom's Cabins' engendering ill-will, keeping up bad blood, and rendering well-disposed, humane, but critically placed men their own enemies, and the stumbling-blocks to civilization, and to the spread of glad tidings from heaven."

So that to reason by analogy, it is unwise to convince any one of the hatefulness of sin lest he should continue in the "gigantic evil;" nay should "bad blood" being engendered by such preaching, go on to worse sins or to rivet the fetters of those which already hold him. If so, farewell to gospel ministry, and welcome the Laissez faire system of opposing and denouncing nothing!

The critique, which was considerably softened down by another, on a book of an opposite tendency, is not worth answering, except in one point. We allude to the attack upon the character of " Uncle Tom" himself, who appears to have been universally declared to be "too good." We who never heard of the black bishops of Carthage in the early ages of the church, seem surprised to find a negro drawn as a perfect Christian, and seem to think it almost a personal affair, that "Uncle Tom" should be so much better than we feel ourselves to be. But this, which some

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