Such he was, if the expression may be admitted, by his nature. His keen, sensitive mind, responded with involuntary sympathy to the touch of the old masters of eloquence and poetry. His quick appreciation of the highest forms of art, led him, as by instinct, to the old classic models. There is scarcely an impression left on our minds by the study of his books or the story of his life, more vivid and distinct than that in all his tastes and pursuits he was, throughout his life, an appreciative and sympathetic scholar.

To metaphysical studies he devoted himself, with all his native enthusiasm, and it will not be deemed strange if we think that to these we can trace back the origin of many of his expressed opinions, and of many of his habits of mind. If it be true, as we have sometimes conjectured, that in one of the characters which his imagination has created, he has sketched, at least in outline, his own experience, his psychological studies gave rise to, and explain many features of his religious life. At all events, it is beyond question that in these studies he found peculiar attractions, and that amongst the eminent thinkers of the old world, Sir Wm. Hamilton was one whom he visited with especial respect and interest.

We have already alluded to his taste. It was, like his scholarship, natural to him, though the best art of the old world and the new, the best society of the metropolis, and deep study and wide reading united to refine it.

There are minds which blend with the manliest strength a feminine delicacy, and a sensitiveness so keen, that they instantly detect and instinctively shrink from those violations of harmony and fitness in literature, in art, in actual life, which others, less finely organized, do not observe or regard. It is to these minds, which sometimes seem almost spiritual in their texture, that we owe our highest conceptions of beauty, our most refined and elevated strains of music, our sweetest and tenderest poetry, our purest and loftiest types of character. Such a mind, high, though not highest in this rare order, was Theodore Winthrop's. He felt, as such natures only feel, the magical power and charm of music to thrill the soul with high aspirations and noble sentiments, or "to steep the being in soft, luxurious languors." He was welcomed to the society of the first artists of the day for his enthusiastic love of art; and his sympathy with the products of the chisel and the pencil, made him an appreciative critic and a congenial associate. His life was filled, as his writings are pervaded, by the influence of his refined æsthetic tastes, of this delicate and sensitive organization of his mind.

We are now prepared to pass from these more evident and superficial qualities, which are at best only the shell of character, and look at Winthrop, not as a gentleman, a scholar, or an artist, but as a man. As such he was, it is true, full of generous impulses and quiet sympathy with certain forms of suffering and distress. Yet these emotions of his better nature were never powerful enough to overcome his intense aristocratic hauteur, or inspire him with any emotion higher than contempt for the vulgar multitude whom he fancied at his feet. Receiving from them no sympathy in his tastes and pursuits, he gave them no sympathy in their interests and wrongs. It was necessary, we are inclined to think, that a social evil should assume magnificent proportions, that charity should widen into humanity, before it could become worthy of his attention or of his exertions. Then, however, when the wrongs to be righted were the wrongs of a race, when a great crime was embodied in a government and backed by an army, and when the champions of liberty were summoned to splendid exploits and heroic sacrifices, he was fearless and prompt on the side of justice and freedom. Winthrop was an Abolitionist, and it was in the cause of the Slave that he entered the army. He was the soldier, not of a constitution, but of an idea; an idea which, unfortunately, concentrated upon a single cause the sympathy to which others, if they deserved it no more, had at least an equal claim. He was in pursuit of lofty ends. He was dazzled by splendid schemes. The ordinary charities of common life did not appeal to his sympathies. The ordinary occupations in which the greatest and the smallest of men may labor side by side, did not gratify his aristocratic exclusiveness. He was amiable and kind in his private intercourse; best loved by those who knew him best. But, in spite of the courage of the soldier and the accomplishments of the scholar, two grand defects marked his character and disfigured his life; the want of moral earnestness, and the want of religious principle. Into the place which these only can fill, he exalted eminent natural virtues, and the refinements of education. If he had not committed this capital error, an error doubtless of theory as well as of practice, we cannot think that a want of persistency and purpose would have left the last years of his life so nearly blank. If he had possessed these, his charity would have been wider, his sympathies less constrained. But, in the army at last, he seemed to have found his place and his work, and the heroism of his brief career as a soldier, has more than redeemed the aimless inactivity of his previous life. If he had not fallen thus, at the outset of his career, we cannot but believe that the promise of that first battle

would have been fulfilled. And while in his early death his country lost a man of genius, taste and culture, a finished scholar, and an accomplished gentleman, we cannot doubt that she lost also a skillful officer and a useful man. As a writer, Theodore Winthrop sprang at once into notice and into fame. If we are correct, only two of his publications, the sketch of the march of the Seventh Regiment to Washington and the paper on "Washington as a Camp," were issued before his death. These two, therefore, alone were subjected to his revision, and received the finishing touches of his hand. The others, written for his own amusement at previous periods, are given to the public precisely as he left them. We must pardon, then, a few tokens of carelessness in the management of the plots, a few errors of taste and infelicities of expression, which we cannot doubt his quick eye would have seen, and his ready pen have corrected, before they had been stereotyped by the press, and repeated through successive editions. The two articles just referred to do not demand from us any special attention, for they are marked by the same general features which characterize his other writings. While full of "the brilliant bustle" of march or review, and serving to convey to the reader the martial ardor of the soldier, they have frequent traces of the artist in the officer, in their more peaceful pictures of sunsets or landscapes. In their intense individuality, they remind us of a series of sketches by Darley, catching, as under his swift but steady pencil, the strong outlines and salient points of the scenes they represent, and then grouping the whole with a unity and strength which leaves them stamped upon the memory.

But it is not upon these papers, admirable as they are, that Winthrop's reputation is based. They served only to bring him before the public as a writer of singular fascination and artistic skill, when, shortly after his death, his first, and as we think, his best novel, was issued from the press.

"Cecil Dreeme" is a novel of New York society. But while we confess its power and its charm, we cannot but think that its author has overstepped the proper boundaries which define the sphere and scope of the novel. The distinction which separates the novel from the romance, is in theory familiar, though in fact it seems to be often disregarded. The romance deals wholly with ideal life and character. It occupies the border land between fact and fancy, between the real world in which we move, and the spiritual world which lies invisible around us. The romancer, therefore, is not limited in his choice, either of characters or of incidents, to the experience and observation of real

life. His incidents may be the widest in their conception, the most crowded in their succession. His imagination may revel amidst the most fantastic scenes. His characters may be the most whimsical creations of his fancy, or the simple embodiment of impersonal qualities. Thus Mr. Hawthorne, who seems to have first appreciated the proper scope and design of the romance, has clearly and purposely, in the "Marble Faun," drawn out the workings of four separate qualities, embodied in four distinct figures on his pages. Donatello is the name he gives to the impersonation of the animal nature; Kenyon is intellect; Miriam, evil; Hilda, conscience. The only condition under which the romancer writes is, that however unreal the beings he creates, however impossible the scenes through which he may conduct them, he shall still preserve the logical relation of incidents and persons, and draw out the legitimate effect of action or suffering, of good or evil, on the character which is placed under their influence.

Into this wide realm of fancy, however, the novelist has no permission to enter. His field is different. He deals with the men and the events of the realm, not of imagination, but of experience. Writing. under the same obligation of logical sequence, he is, at the same time, bound to describe the world of events and of men, as he sees, not conceives them. It seems to be a growing fashion of our times to override this plain and important distinction. The admirers of Charles Dickens, for example, confess that his men and women are not characters, but caricatures,-the creatures of his exhaustless fancy; that Uriah Heep and "the young man by the name of Guppy," are the incarnations of different ideas, not actual or possible existences in society. Yet, in spite of so eminent a model, and in spite of the argu ments of his admirers, we are forced to consider his practice indefensible, and his example pernicious. With better readers, Sir Walter. Scott, and Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr. Dana, and Mrs. Stowe, have adhe red to the legitimate office of the novel, as the mirror of real life. The position and genius of Mr. Dickens may enable him with safety to vis olate the rules of his art, but we cannot justify Winthrop in following. in his steps. Yet this is the fault of all his stories. Robert Byng, and Richard Wade, seem to embody the author's conception of manly strength, of blunt, practical, sturdy self-reliance; cultivated enough, and sufficiently open-hearted, but faultless only in the toughness of their bodies, and the courage and gentleness of their hearts. As such, we confess that they are finely drawn. The author has succeeded in stamping upon them his own ideas; they are, at once, strikingly similar to each other, and we recognize immediately his design in their

conception. As creatures of romance, we may confess them beyond criticism, but they are idealizations, not characters. Densdeth is a being for which the novel has no place. His position is by the side of Milton's Satan, or the Mephistopheles of Goethe; for he is not human. Under "the guise of a man of fashion and fortune," he unites the most intense selfishness, the most insatiable ambition, the most heartless infidelity, the most loathsome sensuality. Virtue, generosity, self-respect, faith, wither under his poisonous touch. With an intellect which drags better natures to his feet, and makes them the slaves of his basest desires; with an elegance of manner which opens to him the highest circles of society, and thus widens the sphere of his reckless machinations; with a will that pursues its victim through years and across oceans, and acts as a willing minister of his passions, he moves steadily forward to the accomplishment of his schemes, over shattered fortunes, broken hearts, ruined virtue, and torture worse than death. He is all of evil that words can paint. He loves it, he lives for it, he seeks to instil it into others whom his fascinations have ensnared; in a word, he is the incarnation of evil-a devil in a man. In the language of a critic, who has pronounced him the central character of the book, "Persons who have been guarded against the usual contrivances by which the conventional Devil works his wonders, find themselves impotent before the fascinations of Densdeth. They follow, while they detest him, and are at once his victims and accomplices." Need we say that such a being as this belongs to the world of poetry or romance, rather than to that of which the novelist writes. We cannot conceive of such a monster, moving unrebuked and unresisted, at once the evil genius and the tyrant of the upper circles of society in New York. Nay, it would shake one's faith in human nature itself, to believe in the presence of such a creature anywhere in its guise.

But Winthrop does not need thus to transgress the proper limits of the novel. In painting characters which we all at once recognize, he has shown the hand of an artist and a genius. John Churm, at least, is a genuine man, honest, generous, brave, true, blunt and practical, yet sensitive and affectionate, with a quick sympathy and a ready help for every form of sorrow and suffering. Clara Denman too, though masked through the greater part of the novel, appears through it all a character of singular purity and beauty, uniting a rare sensitiveness and womanly delicacy, with a courage and fortitude which mount into heroism. The minor characeters, Lockesley, Towner and Raleigh, have each a personality, as distinct in our minds, as if we