In bringing out such relations as these Mr. Fergusson has done excellent service. But when he insists on the sufficiency of his theory, and declares that if it does not indicate the truth about these monuments, nothing is to be known about them, and that it is hopeless to investigate them farther, we cannot follow him. He cannot reconcile himself to ignorance. For our part, while admitting the strange attraction of these silent memorials, and the strong inducement there is to weave theory upon theory around them, we are contented to remain in uncertainty as to their age and origin, hoping much from continued research, from an accurate description of the rude stone monuments, wherever they are found, and from a careful comparison of them. ART. V.-Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. 2 vols. Boston. 1876. THE HE broad general impression left by the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor is admiration blended with surprise at the number, variety and select character of his friends and correspondents as well as the wide range of his attainments: at his exceptionally favourable reception in foreign countries as well as the many excellent qualities of head and heart which caused him to be so highly esteemed and valued in his own. Go where he will, from his first appearance in European society to the last, he is invariably accepted as a welcome guest or associate, and mixes on a perfect footing of equality with the noblest, the most distinguished, the most gifted, the most illustrious of the land. It was his fortunate lot to have known the notabilities of three generations in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; to have lived intimately or conversed familiarly with Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, Rogers, Sydney Smith, Hallam, Malthus, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Lewis, and Macaulay: with Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier with Guizot, Thiers, Tocqueville, and Lamartine : with Goethe, the Schlegels, Tieck, Blumenbach, Savigny, William and Alexander von Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Voss: with Manzoni, Pellico, and Niccolini: with Pozzo di Borgo, Ancillon, Metternich, Antonelli, and Cavour. Princes and fine ladies pay court to him as well as statesmen and men of letters: he has the entrée of the most exclusive houses in the most exclusive capitals: he is made free of the Faubourg St. Germain ; and he is taken to Almack's in the height of its absolutism by a patroness. • When When I went into Spanish society [he sets down at Madrid, in his Journal for 1818] it was at the houses of the Marquis de St. Iago, the Marquis de Sta. Cruz, at Mr. Pizarro's, the Prime Minister's, at the Duchess d'Ossuna's, &c. &c. I mention these because they are the best.' He might have made a similar entry at almost every European capital; and the attentions showered upon him were widely different from those which are ordinarily paid to foreigners bringing good letters of introduction. He converts the best of his casual or passing acquaintances into fast friends; and we find him repeatedly domesticated at such country-houses as Bowood, Hatfield, Woburn, Wentworth, Althorp, Chevening, Lagrange (Lafayette's), Val Richer (Guizot's), and Schloss Tetschen, the magnificent seat of the Counts Thun on the Elbe. Where was the attraction? What was his 'Open sesame' to all hearts and all houses? There was nothing striking or winning about him in look, air, or manner. He had no wit, humour, or vivacity, and very little of what could fairly be called conversational power. To say the truth, he was voted rather heavy in hand in circles which are caught more by quickness of perception, fertility of fancy and flow of language, than by extent of knowledge or solidity of thought. 'What have you done?' was the startling apostrophe of a Frenchwoman to Mackintosh, 'that people should think you so superior?' 'I was obliged,' he says, as usual, to refer to my projects.' If the same question had been put to Mr. Ticknor in the height of his social successes, he must have been driven to the same reply, for his "History of Spanish Literature,' on which his literary reputation rests, was not published till 1849, when he was fifty-eight years of age. There is a French novel, called L'Art de plaire, in which the hero gains all hearts and suffrages, male and female, and wins his way to every object he is bent upon, by an adroit system of flattery, by leaving people always pleased with themselves and by a natural train of association with him. Mr. Ticknor had too much self-respect, too much dignity of character, too little pliancy or suppleness for this. What was it then? 'Wherefore? you ask. I can but guide your guess. His dis Mr. Ticknor was the personification of earnestness. tinctive merit was a lifelong devotion to high objects. He traversed Europe exclusively bent upon these. He never prized *The New Timon.' Vol. 142.-No. 283. M or or courted rank, wealth, or fashion for their own sakes; although he wisely used them as means to an end, especially when found in union with learning, cultivation, accomplishment or worth; thereby practically confirming the author of Lacon:' 'In all societies it is advisable to associate, if possible, with the highest not that the highest are always the best, but because, if disgusted with them, we can at any time descend; but, if we begin with the lowest, to ascend is impossible. In the grand theatre of human life a box-ticket carries us through the house.' Mr. Ticknor was also endowed with an excellent understanding, extraordinary powers of observation and discrimination, a wide range of sympathies controlled by good feeling and good sense, a lofty spirit of independence, and a genuine disinterested admiration for genius and virtue. He seems to have been instinctively drawn towards superior natures without regard to clime; and as this got known or felt, it became a compliment to be sought by him, and a kind of self-flattery to seek him out. Whether we have hit upon the true solution of the problem will best appear from his life and opinions, of which we propose to give as full an account as our limits will permit, simply premising that this is one of the instances in which the reviewer should rely mainly on selection and quotation; for, independently of the biographical interest, we have rarely met with a richer repository of anecdotes, speculations, reflections, and remarks, moral and critical, than are comprised in the two closely-printed volumes before us. Another reason for being liberal in quotation is that no English edition has yet appeared. The opening chapter is headed Birth and Parentage-Autobiographical Sketch.' The citizens of the United States, all democrat or republican as they may be, attach rather undue importance to gentle birth. A transatlantic Warren has published a handsome quarto to prove that the Earl de Warrenne of the Plantagenet times (who left no issue), was his lineal ancestor; and we have seen a royal octavo, 'The Brights of Suffolk,' by a Bright of Boston, which tacitly repudiates (by not naming) the chief English illustration of the race. It was a relief, therefore, to find Mr. Ticknor disclaiming at once all pretensions to a pedigree by stating that his grandfather was a farmer, and that his father, after graduating at Dartmouth College and becoming principal of the Franklin Public School in Boston, felt his health unequal to the labour of teaching, and went into business as a grocer, in which he continued for seventeen years, i.e. till 1812, when he retired on a property 'sufficient for his moderate 'moderate wants and simple tastes.' The occupation of a retail trader seems to have implied no social inequality, for Mr. Elisha Ticknor, the father, lived fàmiliarly with the best of his townspeople, and indeed took the lead amongst them by superior mental training and enlightened zeal for improvement. Thus, he was one of the originators of an excellent system of primary schools, and, with his friend John Savage, the joint founder of the first New England savings-bank. Mr. Ticknor's mother also belonged to a family of farmers, and was employed as a school teacher till, still in her teens, she married a physician, named Curtis, who died in 1784, leaving her a widow with four children, and no property besides a very good house, in which she immediately set up a school for girls. It filled rapidly, and she grew so fond of her original occupation that she continued it for some time after her marriage with Mr. Elisha Ticknor, which took place in 1790. The subject of this biography was the only son of this marriage. With such parents, he was more likely to suffer from an excess of teaching than the lack of it. His father, he says, fitted him for college. He never went to a regular school. President Wheelock, Professor Woodward, and others connected with Dartmouth College, who were in the habit of making his father's house their home in the long winter vacations, took much notice of him; and the Professor, after examining him in Cicero's Orations and the Greek Testament, gave him a certificate of admission before he was ten years old. Of course,' he adds, "I knew very little, and the whole thing was a form, perhaps a farce. There was no thought of my going to college then, and I did not go till I was fourteen; but I was twice examined at the college (where I went with my father and mother every summer) for advanced standing, and was finally admitted as a junior, and went to reside there from Commencement, August 1805. He learnt very little at college. The instructors generally were not as good teachers as my father had been, and I knew it.' He consequently took no great interest in study, although he liked reading Horace, and had mathematics enough to enjoy calculating the great eclipse of 1806, and make a projection of it which turned out nearly right. To supply the deficiency in classical acquirement with which he left college, he was placed under Dr. John Gardiner, of Trinity Church, who was reputed a good scholar, having been bred in the mother country under Dr. Parr. 'I prepared at home what he prescribed, and the rest of the time occupied myself according to my tastes. I read with him parts of Livy, the "Annals" of Tacitus, the whole of Juvenal and Persius, M 2 the the "Satires" of Horace, and portions of other Latin Classics which I do not remember. I wrote Latin prose and verse. In Greek, I read some books of the " Odyssey," I don't remember how many; the "Alcestis," and two or three other plays of Euripides; the "Prometheus Vinctus" of Eschylus; portions of Herodotus, and parts of Thucydides,-of which last I only remember how I was tormented by the account of the Plague at Athens. This was the work of between two and three years.' This sinks into insignificance in comparison with the juvenile acquirements of Macaulay or John Stuart Mill, but was a sufficient preparation for the immediate career marked out for him, and formed no bad foundation for the superstructure he was subsequently led on to raise upon it. In 1810, after residing with Dr. Gardiner for three years, he entered the law office of William Sullivan, son of Governor James Sullivan, and one of the most popular lawyers in Massachusetts. 'I read law with some diligence, but not with interest enough to attach me to the profession. I continued to read Greek and Latin, and preferred my old studies to any other. The only law-books which I remember reading with much interest were Plowden's "Reports," Blackstone's "Commentaries," Saunders's "Reports," in William's edition, and Coke in black letter, which I think I never mastered. 'It was 1813 when I was admitted to the bar, and I immediately opened an office in Court Square, near where Niles's Block stands now, having for a neighbour in the same building Mr. Alexander H. Everett, who had also studied with me, under Mr. Sullivan's auspices. We neither of us were earnest in the study of our profession, but I did rather more law business than he did, and, at the end of a year, paid the expenses of the office, such as rent, boy, &c. 'But I tired of the life, and my father understood it; for I was very frank with him, and told him-what he knew very well-that I was more occupied with Greek and Latin than with law-books, of which he had given me a very good collection.' Nine young men out of ten who give up a regular calling or profession for literary pursuits are actuated by indolence or vanity, or an unlucky combination of both; and a still greater proportion are pretty sure to discover in the long run the truth of Sir Walter Scott's saying, that literature is a good staff but a poor crutch. But Mr. Ticknor, we are quite ready to believe with his biographer, gave up the law, not from a fickle temper or from a restless and dissatisfied spirit, not because he preferred a life of indolence and ease to a life of toil, but because, upon reflection and experiment, he was satisfied that he should be more useful and happy as a man of letters than as a lawyer. 'He |