allurements, she enters a grand saloon, a hundred feet long, extending back to another street, and covered with Wilton carpet, of better quality, probably, than that which she treads in her own parlor. Perhaps the walls and ceilings are frescoed; and, if they are not, they are richly papered and painted. Sewingmachines in long rows, not too close together for convenient moving about, agreeably dot the whole surface of the apartment, as far as the eye can penetrate the gloom of the distance. Along the wall, at the farther end of the room, she will discover, by and by, a row of enclosed desks, like those of a bank, each desk being a small apartment, as elegant and commodious as taste and money can make it. These are for the dignitaries of the Company, - the president, the treasurer, the cashier, the general agent, the advertising clerk. Here and there a young lady may be seen "operating" one of the machines in a graceful attitude, and with such perfect ease as to dispel the fears of a purchaser most distrustful of her powers. The rapid and yet not noisy click of the machines is cheering, and seems the appropriate music of the place. And this grand hall is only one of many apartments. The basement, and the cellar below the basement, each as large as the store, are occupied as depositories, repairing-shops, packingrooms; while in the story above the store may be found superb rooms, wherein ladies who have bought a machine receive instruction in the art of using it, attending daily, if they choose, until they have become proficients in hemming, sewing, braiding, making button-holes, and in all the other varieties of needle-work.

The clerk who advances to wait upon the lady soon learns her errand, and discovers her ignorance. Indeed, she frankly avows her ignorance. She has come out, she artlessly says, in pursuit of knowledge. She desires to ascertain which is the best sewingmachine in existence for family use. Long practice has taught an intelligent and ambitious young man how to deal

with cases of this kind. He does, in his inmost soul, believe that the sewingmachines made by the company he serves are the very best in the world, especially for family use. But he feels the delicacy of his situation. "Of course, madam, we are interested parties, and it would be no more than natural that we should represent our machines to be the best in the market. But it is no part of the policy of our company to disparage those made by our neighbors. We are on friendly terms with them, and we are ready to admit that some of them do make machines which for some purposes are excellent. But when it comes to machines for family use, which is our specialty, why then, madam, we cannot hesitate. Upon that point there can be but one opinion. Nevertheless, we do not ask ladies to believe what we say; we show them what our machine does, and let it speak for itself." Conciliated by such modesty and candor, the lady watches with pleasure and admiration while one dexterous young lady runs up a seam, and another hems a sheet, and another does a little quilting, and another makes a button-hole in half a minute. The lady herself takes a seat at a machine, and is astonished to find herself sewing at a rattling pace, "without any previous instruction."

She is convinced. She is perfectly satisfied. She sympathizes with the tender compassion expressed by the clerk for the great number of ladies who have been deluded into buying other machines, which, after distracting a household for many months, are now discarded and consigned to the garret. "You see, madam, advertising can force a machine on the market; but, in the long run, real merit overcomes all opposition." She assents with her whole soul to this proposition. It accords with what she has observed of human life. She has even made the remark herself.

The impulse is strong within her to buy one of these peerless machines on the spot, and she has not the slightest

doubt that she shall do so in the course of the day. But it was agreed between her husband and herself, that she should examine all before purchasing; and so, in obedience to a stern sense of duty, she resolves to go through the form the mere formof looking at other machines. She feels that she must be able to say that she has fulfilled her compact.

He

In another spacious and elegant saloon, another accomplished clerk claims for another machine precisely the same excellences, which other young ladies proceed to exhibit. If she ventures timidly to intimate that she has been looking at a machine elsewhere, the accomplished clerk knows well how to proceed. He discourses at large upon the merits of all the machines. exhibits all the varieties of needles employed in them, and expatiates upon the very complicated machinery used to propel those needles. "Your own common sense must tell you, madam, that the simpler a piece of mechanism is, the less liable it is to get out of order, and the more easily it is worked by an inexperienced person. Now, madam, our machine contains eleven pieces less than any other in the market, and your own common sense must tell you that every piece added to a machine makes it more complicated, and more easily disarranged. Don't misunderstand me, madam; I do not say that the machine you examined on the other side of the street was not a very good one, in its day; but some people, you know, when they have a pretty good thing, are satisfied, and don't keep up with the times. However, we never speak ill of our neighbors. We simply show what our machine is, and what it can do.

Your own common cide."

sense must de

And so he goes on, until the lady shudders to think what a narrow escape she has had from falling a victim to the wiles of the brilliant young man who first entertained her. By the time she has gone the rounds of the ten or twelve sewing-machine establishments in Broadway between Canal Street and Union Square, she is in a state of mind to buy a wheelbarrow in order to end the agonizing struggle.

In truth, ladies, there is no such thing as an absolutely and universally best sewing-machine. Each has its special merits, which make it the best for some purposes. No machine exists which will sew equally well the sole-leather for a trunk and the cambric of a chemisette. The machine that is best for a family of young children may not be the best for a family of grown daughters, who go to balls and want new cloaks every winter. The machine that is best for a farmer's wife may not be the best for a fine lady of the city; but though not the best, it is so good that she could hardly be made to believe there could be a better. We find, accordingly, that every lady believes firmly in the sewing-machine which she is so fortunate as to possess.

It is but just to add, that all the wellknown makers have seized the truth, that the only way in which a business permanently great can be created, is by serving the public with systematic and scrupulous fidelity. Nothing can exceed the care taken by them all that no machine shall leave the factory which shall not be, as long as it lasts, an advertisement for the company whose name it bears.

has are directed to persons and themes which excite the antipathies of average readers. In both we are conscious of a certain intellectual superciliousness, a dainty withdrawal from the common and vulgar in human life, an implied appeal to the higher class of cultivated minds alone. They seem to think the human race so fine a thing in itself, that most of the individuals who compose it ought to be ashamed of themselves for not being capable of loftier virtues or more impressive depravities. They love, in fact, their notions of the possibilities of humanity, rather than humanity itself. Like nature, as complained of by the painter, real human beings are apt to "put them out." Among novelists, Thackeray is tolerant, but then his toleration is essentially contemptuous of its objects; Kingsley, with all his vehement pretences to comprehension, only succeeds in individualizing his pet theories of men and women, and makes coxcombs even of his bullies; and George Eliot, who in general compass of intellect excels all contemporary romancers, and whose nicety and force of characterization are, in her own walk, so admirable, still appears to consider humanity with profound pity rather than confident hope, and leaves on the minds of her readers an impression of sadness which her large charity is powerless to overcome. It is curious that Carlyle, the most illiberal of modern writers, a man who loses no occasion to vent his scorn on whole races and nations, and who considers all the philanthropic opinions, enterprises, and tendencies of the age to be but signs of a prevailing infectious cant, should still possess more dramatic sympathy and insight, more appreciation of humble, homely worth, and more solid power of characterization, than the great body of the liberal thinkers who look upon his misanthropic generalities with disgust or horror.

Alone among his contemporaries, Charles Dickens seems to possess that instinctive sympathy with whatever is human and humane which is the fundamental condition of genial and varied

characterization. In impersonated abstractions of humanity which satisfy our ideal of human nature, he may be exceeded; in individualities which make us in love with our kind, he is unapproached. Tennyson has written one poem, "Enoch Arden," in which his beautiful genius has dealt with humble life; but though the sentiment is fine, and the diction austerely simple, the characters and the scenes are as remote from actual existence as any of those in the "Idyls of the King." If Enoch Arden be compared with Peggotty, in "David Copperfield," the difference between the two methods of characterization becomes at once evident. So intense and real is Dickens's conception, so strong his hold on the noble elements in Peggotty's being, that he can venture to represent him in all the uncouthness of his person, his language, and his surroundings. Through his strange, confused, ungrammatical, "vulgar" speech shines the soul of the man; and this makes his jargon as dignified as the periods of Burke. If Tennyson had attempted a similar feat in "Enoch Arden," the result would have been an ignominious failure.

The nature of a writer determines the character of his creations. Though the terms "subjective" and "objective" now play a prominent part in criticism, and are good to indicate loose distinctions between classes of minds, it is important to remember that all creative minds are subjective, — that the subjective includes everything in nature and human life, which such minds vitally perceive, absorb into their own being, and literally make their In the case of Dickens, gifted though he be with wonderfully acute powers of external observation, this is obviously the fact, for no writer stamps the character of his genius on everything he writes more plainly than he. It is impossible to mistake his style, his method, his sentiment, his humor, his characters. His observing power, when extended beyond the range of his sympathies, becomes "objective," it is

own.