dead beyond all resurrection. There was a big contest for the Democratic nomination. Cass, Buchanan, Marcy, and Douglas were all aspirants but again the two-thirds rule was an obstacle. Cass had a majority of the delegates, but another dark horse was nominated in the person of Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. He won easily although there was a Free Soil diversion under Hale which captured many Democratic votes and many Whigs also. Scott received more votes than Taylor had done four years before, but he had a pitiful showing of electoral votes.

Failure of

a trained Statesman

In 1856 there were three candidates again and this time the third party was more formidable than ever before. The

Democrats nominated Buchanan this time and he was nearer the real choice of

his party than any nominee from 1844 to 1876. The majority of the Republicans wanted Seward, who was the most conspicuous man in the party, but he was not available" because, as governor of New York, he had offended the Native Americans who were a formidable factor in the political situation. The nomination went to Fremont, a man very popular by his California discoveries but who was not worthy the office and whose after-life showed that he was not the man for the head of the nation in a crisis. The third party, being the Americans, nominated Fillmore who polled nearly 900,000 votes, but Buchanan was elected. Buchanan had been in public life almost since reaching his majority, had experience in many directions and so far as could be judged was an excellent man for the place. How he failed at the critical moments is a matter of history.

the South, nominated Bell of Tennessee. The Republicans met at Chicago and the general expectation was that Seward would be the nominee. He had by far the largest number of delegates pledged to him, and it can be fairly said that he was the real choice of the masses of the Republican party. But Seward's friends who came to Chicago so confident met with an opposition they did not expect.

We are all agreed in believing that Lincoln was one of the greatest of our Presidents, and many believe that he was divinely chosen for his great work. If this is true, it shows that Providence works through human agencies, for of all political conventions that were ever held there was more of dicker

ing and log-rolling at Chicago than at any other convention in our history. Lincoln himself had been working hard for the nomination, though he hardly expected it. He had even offered to pay the expenses of a friend if he would get himself elected to the convention. What would political purists say to that in these days! It is not necessary to believe that Lincoln knew all that his friends did at Chicago, but he was "in the hands of his friends" and these friends tied his hands most beautifully, and Lincoln was honorable enough to carry out all their promises, which is more than some other Presidents have done. Why, for instance, were Cameron, Bates, and Smith, in the cabinet? By means of combinations Lincoln was nomment to the great body of Republicans. inated, and it was a distinct disappoint

So far as could be judged on the surface, Seward was far and away the best fitted man for the place, and the distrust of Lincoln extended long after he was elected,- so much so that Seward took it upon himself to offer to be President and let Lincoln be a figurehead only. It is needless to say that this offer, made in good faith, was declined, and history has shown how great a President Lincoln was, and how badly the country would have fared on several important occasions if Seward's advice had been taken. This is meant as no reflection upon the latter, who was a great statesman, and as Secretary of State did invaluable service. The point made here is that the man who was "available" made a better President than the one who seemed to be the best fitted for the place.

McClellan was nominated in 1864 as an emergency candidate and was a complete failure.

Grant's

Two Terms

In 1868 the natural turn

ing of the people to military heroes gave Grant the nomination almost without a struggle. He has been harshly criticized for his administrations, but as time goes on these criticism are being modified and the historical verdict is largely in his favor. He was elected a second time easily over Horace Greeley, who was a great and good man, a man without a peer in his own sphere, but as presidential timber he was a failure. It should have been said that Seymour, who ran against Grant the first time, was a representative Democrat, but under the circumstances his candidacy counted for little, as the election of Grant was a foregone conclusion.

The Tilden and Hayes Contest

The nomination of Tilden in 1876 was one of the best that the party could have made. He had been long in public life and his record as a reformer in New York City commended him to many people. The nomination of Hayes cannot be said to have been the deliberate choice of his party, for few people outside of Ohio had ever heard of him. He was a darkhorse candidate who won in a large field against Blaine, Cameron, Conkling and Bristow. Indeed it is likely that Blaine would have won at Cincinnati if some one had not turned off the gas one night during the balloting. During the night

a new combination was made that landed Hayes. Blaine and Clay were the two most popular men among the masses of their party, if we can judge from all accounts, that this country has ever had, and yet neither reached the presidency.

An Emergency In 1880 Hancock was Candidate nominated by the Democrats after Tilden had positively refused to run. He was nominated on the score of "availability." The ever-memorable contest at Chicago need not be narrated in detail. Blaine, Grant and Sherman were the leading candidates and the unit rule killed them all off and Garfield was finally chosen. He was a dark horse. He was elected but died so soon that one cannot say what kind of a President he would have made. At least he did not keep

faith with Conkling as the latter understood the matter. The merit of this controversy need not be discussed here.

In 1884 Blaine won the coveted nomination easily from Arthur who was the most successful of all our accidental Presidents. The Democrats nominated Cleveland because he had been phenomenally successful in New York politics and because many persons who had affiliated with the Republican party believed that he would make a good President. He was nominated on the score of "availability" and had other claims besides and these were justified by the people at the polls.

Blaine refuses the Nomination

The nomination in 1888 at St. Louis went to Cleveland unanimously because he had given his party an issue. The Republicans were anxious to nominate Blaine once more, but he refused though it was believed that he would accept up to the time that the balloting began. Harrison was nominated by combinations and there was great disappointment in many quarters. On the score of public service

and usefulness the nomination should have gone to Sherman, but the dark horse again won. Harrison was as little known by the public at large as any President since Pierce, yet in point of ability, either intellectually or as a constructive statesman, he ranks among the first. Unfortunately he lacked the arts of popularity which greatly hurt him. when he ran again. Harrison in many respects resembled the younger Adams. Both were men of ability but neither received that amount of personal sympathy from the people which is so essential to a successful President of a republic.

In 1892 Harrison won the nomination after a hard fight, and if Mr. Blaine had made a canvass for the place he might have been nominated. Indeed, he would probably not have been opposed. The Democrats nominated Cleveland once more in a convention that will ever be famous for its bitterness and for the fervid oratory of Cleveland's opponents. His nomination was due largely to the tactful manipulation of William C. Whitney, and to the fact that Mr. Cleveland was in all respects the most "available" candidate with all that the term implies. He won.

In 1896 McKinley was nominated on

the first ballot by the Republicans, and was undoubtedly the popular choice of his party. This was true in a sense not before known, because his name was linked with the tariff in a personal way more than was Cleveland's with the opposite view. Bryan was nominated by the Democrats under circumstances so recent as to need no retelling. Never has the effect of a single speech in politics produced greater or more speedy results. As all know, the people decided in favor of the Republican candidate.

And now that the history of nominating presidents has been briefly rehearsed, it is only necessary to repeat what was said at the beginning, that the question of the correspondent cannot be fully answered. There is no criterion by which we may infallibly judge of the qualifications of men for any position in life. It is a matter of experience, and what that experience has been in this country, it has been the purpose of this article to set forth.

EATH, the other day, has added another to the "stilled voices" in the tuneful choir of modern English minstrels. Miss Jean Ingelow, who died in London on the 20th of July last, came, like Tennyson, of a Lincolnshire family, and more than traces of the late English Laureate's influence can be found in her works. Since the death of Mrs. Browning, to whom she also owed much of her inspiration, and the passing away of Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow may be said to have held the laurel crown of the female poets in England; and though of recent years her popularity has seemed to wane, much of her work is likely, we think, to live. She was especially strong in the lyrical field, and her poetry is marked, as was Christina Rossetti's, by an introspective religious cast, as well as by much beauty and melody of form. If there be one dominant note in her song, observes an admirer of her work, it is a quiet joyfulness in the beauties of nature that forbids anything like querulousness or morbidity. In her pages we hear the birds in full song and see the flowers in bloom.

In her poem "Honors" it was one of the lessons she taught that in this love of natural beauty in its every form lay man's truest happiness.

"For me the freshness in the morning hours,
For me the water's clear tranquillity,
For me the soft descent of chestnut flowers,
The cushat's cry for me.

"For me the bounding-in of tides; for me

The laying-bare of sands when they retreat, The purple flush of calm, the sparkling glee When waves and sunshine meet."

The fine dramatic poem by which Jean Ingelow is best known, with its quaint

JOSEPH M. ROGERS.

Elizabethan dialect and haunting rhythm and refrain, is "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." In spite of the often common handling it receives at the hands of indifferent declaimers and public reciters, the lines are destined to live. She has also written much other minor verse, of considerable beauty, and occa sionally of no sionally of no little originality and strength. strength. Especially attractive are her stories in blank verse, such as "Brothers and a Sermon," and of great sweetness and purity is much of her subjective verse, to wit "Divided," and "The Songs of Seven." Alike in her poetry as well as in her novels, Jean Ingelow's powers were always devoted to high and noble ends.

A collected volume of her poetry first appeared in 1850, which has since been repeatedly issued, with considerable additions. In 1867 she published a separate volume of verse entitled, "A Story of Doom," while a third volume, "Poems by Jean Ingelow," appeared in 1887. These were followed successively by "Monitions of the Unseen and Poems of Love and Childhood," and "Poems of the Old Days and the New." She also wrote a number of works of fiction, besides several stories for children, full of delicate fancy and elevated thought. Of her novels the following may be specially mentioned: "Off the Skelligs" (1872), perhaps her finest production; "Fated to be Free" (1875); "Don John (1876); "Sarah Berenger" (1880); and "John Jerome" (1886). At her death, Jean Ingelow had attained her seventyseventh year.

G. M. A.

A

LTHOUGH the dominant, lifelong desire of Bayard Taylor's heart was to be a poet, he is, in the popular sense, and to his own countrymen, best known as a traveller. The literary world, how ever, knows him to have been much more than a mere traveller; and the scope and volume of the work he has left behind him prove not only the industry of the once poor Pennsylvania farmer-boy, but attest the irrepressible energy of his nature and the extraordinary versatility of his powers. And yet, with all his manifold labors and the undoubted success he achieved, no one who closely follows his career,- certainly none who has read his "Life and Letters,❞— can believe that he was satisfied with the work he accomplished or the status he attained, even though his collected writings (including travel, fiction, poetry, and his admirable translation of Goethe's "Faust") extend to twenty goodly volumes, and he died holding the post of Ambassador to Germany. His is not an instance, where, had he written less, the quality would have been higher. It is rather, as we think, an instance of ambitions founded on too slight a foundation of creative ability, and upon an education too meagre and desultory to make good the intellectual deficiency, though ample enough to enable him,— as a modest man of letters, to perceive, and to be secretly tormented by, the limitations of his powers. While we say this, however, we are not to be understood as depreciating either the man or his gifts. On the contrary, we not only hold both in high esteem, but we honor the poet the more since he himself recognized a lofty ideal in his work, and, with long and serious toil, earnestly sought to achieve it.

The poet, on his father's and on his mother's side, was of German descent, and in his youth he spoke the patois known as Pennsylvania Dutch.* ancestors of the family were Quakers, though both parents and the son himself

The

* "Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor," edited by Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder. Third edition, 2 vols. 12 mo., Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885.

Bay

belonged to the Lutheran Church. ard Taylor was born in a village in Chester County, Pa., called Kennett Square, though when he was four years old the family removed to a farm in the vicinity of the village, where they continued to live until "Cedarcroft" was built, on the site of the old homestead. On the farm the youth was brought up and about it his earliest recollections gathered. Here he received from his mother the rudiments of education, eked out, until he went to a school in the neighborhood kept by a Quaker dame, by his own eager reading from the village library. Poetry and travel, we are told, were his chief delights, supplemented by a modicum of history and copious draughts of fiction. Years afterwards, it is related, when on his own travels, a poem which he had learned by heart or a book from the library which he had read, came back to him as he visited in person places which he had known only in imagination. From his early youth he seemed to live in an ideal world, and from his twelfth year he indulged in literary composition, his poetic temperament inciting him mainly to the writing of verse.

Young Bayard's education embraced, for a time, a little more than that which the dame's school afforded. This he received at an Academy in West Chester and later at one in Unionville, Pa.; but his schooling was over for him by the year 1842, though he ardently pursued his own individual efforts at selfculture, alike from observation and from books. N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way" was an early source of pleasing instruction to him, and the delightful pictures of scenery and society set forth in the work had a stimulating influence on the youth and whetted his taste for travel.

After a brief period of teaching at the Unionville Academy, a vocation towards which Bayard Taylor was by no means drawn, he was apprenticed to a printer at West Chester, which gave the youthful poet the opportunity, when the drudgery of his duties at the case and handpress permitted, to become familiar with

the mechanism of journalism and to indulge his increasing passion for versewriting. His literary productiveness at this early period was great, and among the poems he then wrote was one which he had forwarded for publication to a Philadelphia journal. The poem was the means of gaining him the friendship of Rufus W. Griswold, editor of "The Poets and Poetry of America," who, a little later, issued Taylor's first sheaf of verse, samples of which had already appeared in the "New York Mirror" and "Graham's Magazine." The publication of "Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena, and other Poems," though it opened a vista to its author's literary ambitions, and to this extent was an event in his life, made no great mark in the world of letters, and its cost had to be provided for by subscriptions among Taylor's relatives and friends. Its issue, however, was a passport to the favor and friendly offices of other literary magnates of the time, and among others to N. P. Willis and Horace Greeley of New York.

At this epoch, the youth, now just entering manhood, was possessed by a longing to go abroad. Travel, he knew, would enlarge his mind, expand his faculties, and make good to him, in large measure, the defects of his education. His friend Griswold bought some manuscripts from him, for the Philadelphia "Post," and from other quarters he had commissions, paid for in advance, for poems and narrative pieces, then unwritten. Greeley of the Tribune, gave him, moreover, a conditional order for a series of foreign letters, of which he afterwards wrote eighteen from Germany. Having made these modest arrangements, and with less than $150 in his pocket, he sailed for Liverpool, and there set forth, on foot, to see the world and all the wonder thereof. After visiting the north of England and parts of Scotland, he crossed over to Belgium and proceeded up the Rhine to Heidelberg, thence to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he settled for the winter of 1844-5 to study German and put his pen to such uses as he was able to turn into money.

Taylor's facility in acquiring languages was phenomenal, and his sojourn in Frankfort enabled him soon to speak German as a native. In the spring of 1845 he set out once more on his travels, knapsack on back, and saw Leipsic, Dresden,

The

Prague, Munich, and Vienna, and after a brief return to Frankfort he crossed the Alps on foot and made his home for a while in Florence, where he acquired a knowledge of Italian. knowledge of Italian. From Florence he proceeded, still on foot, to Rome and Civita Vecchia, where he took a deckpassage to Marseilles and travelled on foot to Paris. After a stay there and in London of some three months, he returned home and brought out a collected edition of his graphic letters to the N. Y. Tribune, in the volume entitled "Views Afoot" (1846), of which six editions were sold within the year. tour and its results were very gratifying to the young traveller, though the toil had been great and the privations were not few. In the two years he had earned five hundred dollars, and his expenses for travel and maintenance for the period were just within the amount of his income. The mental gains of his visit abroad were, however, his most valued acquisitions, since they not only met the needs of his ardent, eager nature, but gave him an experience of the world and his fellowmen which were an education to him. The chroniclings of his journeys abroad delight one by their freshness, while they manifest his immense capacity for wonder and enjoyment. As he himself wrote, a new day had dawned in his life. Thought seemed to have taken a sudden growth, fetters of which he had not before been conscious were broken, and, as he phrased it, he was continually surprised at the broader light in which many subjects now presented themselves.

Shortly after his return from Europe, Taylor acquired an interest, with a friend, in a newspaper issued in his own county, but in 1847 he withdrew from it and removed to New York, where Greeley offered him a position on the Tribune a connection which lasted for thirty years. years. The publication of his "Rhymes of Travel, Ballads and Poems” (1848) added to the reputation Taylor had gained as a traveller, while it opened the prospect of marriage with a young lady, whose parents had heretofore refused to countenance the young lover. His fian

cée (Mary Agnew by name) was, however, in precarious health, and the poet won the happiness of calling her wife only within two months of her death, at the close of 1850.