festing themselves by cries of regret, by longings and stern resolutions. But this Journal, so short a way does it take us, does not exhibit him as travelled so far towards perfection, that the moral powers can be recognized in him in their fulness. His subsequent letters, and the accounts of his friends, show him in a state where he has made a nearer approach to calmness, and obtained some mastery over his impulses and his feelings. But yet there were reasons imbedded in his physical constitution, that forbade his attaining perfection in this part of his nature; and the progress that he did make, was, it is to be feared, not without hurt to his freshness and simplicity.

These are the reflections which have occurred to us upon reading Guérin's remains, and the Essays of Sainte-Beuve and Arnold that introduce them. In making them, we have not wished to injure the reputation which the name of Guérin has obtained with those - we fear too few - who know the rare and amiable qualities of the brother and sister; nor have we wished to exalt any thing English or American at the expense of any thing French, but rather, while emphasizing the true claims of the brother to admiration, to throw the true light upon his character, and bring him into relation with other names which we have learned to venerate.

We are glad that his Journal is now put into an English dress, and that thus the circle of his readers may be widened. Mr. Fisher has made his version with an accuracy that leaves little room for question; but there is a want of harmony between different parts of the work, and for which not Mr. Fisher but the French editor is responsible. We do not know how it has happened, but Sainte-Beuve seems to have had access to more abundant sources than M. Trebutien. Page 43, compared with page 100, shows Sainte-Beuve's quotations to be fuller than the text, - a strange reversal of custom; and the sentence omitted from the text adds something to the description. Page 44, again, has two paragraphs more than page 101. But the difference between Sainte-Beuve's quotations and the Journal is shown still more strikingly in that form of his preface which he has published in the fifteenth volume of his "Causeries." The discrepancy relates to the records for Dec. 8 and 20, 1833, a part of the present publication which, as those familiar with the book know, is perhaps of greatest interest; and yet Sainte-Beuve's new preface has a number of striking passages or little turns of expression that are wholly ignored by M. Trebutien, and, of course, by his American translator. Sainte-Beuve quotes a paragraph or two, and apparently omits more, that are found neither in his original preface nor in the published Journal. We pass over these; but we wish to call attention to two or three additional details that he has given to the description which Guérin has written of his life at M. de La Morvonnais'. They seem to us curious and of interest. To what is said on page 104, "the subsequent walk, a sort of greeting and adoration that we offer to nature," Sainte-Beuve quotes, in addition, "for it seems good to me, after having worshipped God directly in the morning prayer, to bend the knee to that mysterious power that he has given for the adoration of a few," - a mystical sentence, but perhaps of importance in deciding Guérin's theological position. Again, to "dinner announced... by a gentle voice," the new preface adds, "that calls us from below," - a little detail; but the whole passage is taken up with the menus détails of Morvonnais' housekeeping. So the Journal speaks of "the crackling fire of dry brush around which we draw our chairs just afterwards;" but, instead of "just afterwards," Sainte-Beuve adds, "after that sign of the cross which bears to heaven our rendering of thanks." Neither Sainte-Beuve nor M. Trebutien speak of "various readings" to Guérin's Journal; and these discrepancies are somewhat strange. Some of them, however, may perhaps be accounted for by the remark of the French critic, that "the present edition bears, on many a page, the marks of the religious scruples of Guérin's friends."

ART. V. - SOCIAL EMULATION, AS A FEATURE OF AMERICAN LIFE.

New America. By WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

MR. DIXON's vivacious and entertaining story deals as we have remarked elsewhere - mainly with a few phenomena, mostly abnormal, in the social and religious life of this country, which are doing their part to shape out a "new America," differing, in many most important features, from what is familiar and old. We shall not attempt, at this time, to discuss the general character of that revolution whose germs and elements he seeks in the chaos of new opinions and strange experiments; but rather to trace the influence of a single motive, - perhaps more potent than any other single one in effecting those more superficial changes which strike every traveller's eye, and perhaps equally important with any other in affecting the tone and quality of our people's moral life. We mean the motive of social emulation, to which the strength and the weakness, the safety and the danger, of our American life are largely due, - a motive never before so active and wide-spreading in its operation as now and here.

Nowhere but in a young, prosperous country, uncrowded, with undeveloped and unlimited resources, could this principle have the sway it possesses among ourselves. In older nations, emulations are confined within narrow bounds. A certain spirit of contentment, born of circumstances that promise but doubtful prizes to ambition or rewards to effort, captivates the heart weary with observing the restlessness and forward-pushing desires of our own people. But, where this moderation or contentment prevails, we find feeble and dispirited energies, unawakened or drowsy powers, and a fixed mediocrity of affairs. Old abuses go uncured. Permanent inequalities prevail. Along with unknown and unused resources, there is needless poverty, stereotyped dulness and thinness of life. Doubtless, no state of society is so picturesque as one in which broad contrasts are produced by unequal laws: on one side, a lofty aristocracy; on the other, a meek and dependent vassalage. None is so saintly in seeming as that in which a showy asceticism, accompanied with a sentimental devoutness, produces faces and costumes which are the delight of artists and the awe of ritualists. And, besides the picturesque effect, there is often an advantage more substantial. A noble condescension in the high, or a tender reverence in the low; the loyalty of an implicit faith, or that order of graces which flows out of the relations of widely-contrasted classes of society, cannot be had where the exalted of yesterday are brought low to-day, and the low of to-day are lifted up to-morrow. Still, justice is the only permanent foundation of political or social life. All legal or artificial inequalities are curses and wrongs. The freest nation, the most equitable law, has the surest guaranty of its stability and happiness.

Social emulation is the whip that stirs the slothful faculties and drowsy desires of that constitutionally idle animal, man. It is to this, in great measure, we owe our swift growth in wealth and civilization. No man is willing to be poorer, less favored, less respectable, than his neighbors. He must be as well clothed and as well appointed as they; his family must be as well dressed and housed as theirs; he will not be content with less of educational advantage, or religious privilege, or opportunity of literary culture, or facility of communication with the world at large. The railroad system of this country, that miracle of energy, wealth, and engineering skill, is due but in small part to immediate needs of commerce, or hope of pecuniary profit. Farmers have mortgaged their lands to invest in roads that merely increased their sense of being in direct relations with the centres of life, and not behind the times; and this emulation has provoked and sustained enterprises of the most hopeless financial character. Take the Baltimore and Ohio Road, for example, - running directly across the bed of numerous torrents, or laid in rocky troughs, or raised on huge embankments, or lifted on stilted tressels, here heaving an expensive bridge, there diving into a tunnel bored through a granite mountain.* Contemplating the poverty of the region and the costliness of the road, one is dumb with wonder at that ambitious rivalry which would not allow Pennsylvania or New York to frame the only bonds between East and West, but compelled Maryland and Virginia to this herculean and magnificent task, at any cost to their resources. In the West, social emulation is the great civilizer. It bridges the Mississippi; it occupies the banks of the Colorado and Columbia; it carries schools, churches, colleges, all the comforts and refinements of the oldest parts of this country, into the newest Territories and States. Michigan claims the largest American university, most munificent in endowment, and most generous in plan. St. Louis is at this hour rebuilding the largest and most sumptuous hotel in the world, destroyed by the recent conflagration; is building an Episcopal church, perhaps the costliest on the continent; has the finest building for a Polytechnic Institute to be found in America; the noblest Post-office and City Hall; and has grown, in the last thirty years, from fourteen thousand inhabitants to upwards of two hundred thousand. Chicago, even more energetic and restless, rivals New York in bustle and stir, and in its vast territorial extent. With its elegant churches, its convenient and expensive school-houses, it looks in parts like a city hundreds of years old; while in other parts a mere collection of extemporized shanties. The best models of New-England schools, with the best teachers, are already scattered over Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California. No Eastern churches that we have seen are as thoroughly equipped for parish uses and religious charities, as are found in Illinois, Missouri, and California. The social element is so predominant in Western piety, that the churches almost uniformly provide for every gratification and development of that feeling, - some even including arrangements for exhibiting tableaux and semi-dramatic

* Sixteen of these tunnels we counted, on a recent journey, in a few miles. The melting snow, followed by a bitter frost, had decked the sides of those rocky excavations with frozen stalactites of enormous proportions. A fringe of colossal circles hung from the opposite walls of the gleaming way, and, as the sun got power, melted into noisy cataracts, and echoed the thunder of the train.

VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. III.

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