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tive." Marshall was apprenticed to a stonemason, whose trade he followed for many years; yet at the same time he showed his love of plants by embellishing his father's farm at the Forks of the Brandywine. In 1773, he built his own house, and planned and commenced the botanic garden at Marshallton, which he filled with curious plants, many of which, especially the noble oaks, pines, and magnolias, still survive, although the garden from neglect has become a mere wilderness. In 1780, Marshall began to prepare an account of the forest trees and shrubs of this country, which was published about five years afterwards, in a duodecimo volume of about two hundred pages. This was the first truly indigenous botanical essay published in the western hemisphere; it was in advance of the times, for it excited little interest in the community, and the publisher writes, "I have had accounts from Trenton and New York, but there is not one subscriber in either place; they sell but slow. I think we have not sold a dozen beside those to the subscribers." This book, the expense of the publication of which Marshall was obliged to defray for himself, was appreciated abroad, and translated into most of the languages of Europe.

In the latter part of his life, Marshall's eyesight was impaired by a cataract, and the operation of couching was performed with only partial success; but he was never entirely blind, and to the last enjoyed walking about his garden and examining the trees and plants. He died in 1801, aged 79. We have not room to make any extracts from his correspondence, although there are many interesting letters in it, particularly those written during the Revolution, which show the state of feeling on both sides of the Atlantic.

ART. IX.-Lady Alice; or the New Una. A Novel. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1849. 8vo. pp. 152.

"Or the bad preacher," says a recent writer," it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in ;

whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography." This sentence embodies a truth wellnigh universal. All the higher forms of literature are indeed cosmopolitan in their currency and their acceptance; but it is because, with incontestable marks of their birthplace, they are adopted to citizenship everywhere else. A sophomore's theme or a school-girl's lyric suggests no reason why it should have been written in New England rather than in Kamtschatka. Stupidity, sciolism, and those ambitious forms of composition for which neither consciousness nor experience furnishes material, are of no soil or zone. The man, who lacks a heart, or who claps an extinguisher upon it when he writes, may succeed in denationalizing himself. But not a strophe of the Hebrew poets could have been written out of Palestine. Shakspeare by the walls of Troy, and Milton in Pandemonium, are Englishmen still; and Dante no more sinks the Florentine in Purgatory than in exile. The aroma of Scottish heather would have belied the London imprint, had Burns made an anonymous début under the auspices of a metropolitan publisher; and, had the Waverley novels first appeared in Boston, no American would ever have been suspected of their authorship.

We regard it, therefore, as an equivocal compliment to the Lady Alice, that, on its publication in England, it should have been without question received, read, reviewed, ("highly reviewed," we are told in an advertisement to the edition before us,) as an English book. And, frequent as have been the instances of literary "conveyance" with which we have had reason to charge our trans-Atlantic brethren, we most cordially enter for them the plea of "not guilty" in the present instance. Had we not heard the author's name on the most trustworthy testimony, we should distrust the strongest array of title-page evidence to the cis-Atlantic origin of a work, of which the author evidently deems his own fatherland "not worthy." We have looked through it in vain for a single trace of American culture, sentiments, or sympathies, for a single recognition of the liberal ideas and feelings as to religion, politics, or the distinctions of society, which are supposed to pervade all classes and sects in our republic. The only circumstance which might betray the

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secret of its authorship to an English critic is the intense over-working of the aristocratic and hierarchical elements, the more than homage, the utter prostration of soul alike before coronets and liveries, and the unreasoning adulation of inveterate absurdities and abuses which, though tolerated, have grown intolerable in the land of their nativity.

The story has its first scene laid in the luxurious valley of Cava, between the Gulfs of Naples and Salerno, where Augustus and Frederic Clifford, Englishmen by birth, Romanists in faith, have fixed their residence for a season. They are possessed of ample wealth, and belong to a family which dates its patent of nobility from the Norman conquest. And, as regards pedigree, to avoid the necessity of farther detail, we will say once for all, that an ancestral tree of at least eight centuries' growth is an indispensable qualification, not only for a prominent actor, but almost for an interlocutor or a marplot, in this novel; while, from the author's abhorrence for the slightest plebeian stain, we cannot conceive of his characters as offshoots, however remote, from that primitive family in which "Adam delved and Eve span." To return to our story, Frederic saves the life of a beautiful girl, who is bathing a little apart from her companions; and, at the moment of her awakening to consciousness, they find themselves mutually in love. He ascertains that she is Alice Stuart, youngest daughter of the Duke of Lennox, himself originally a Presbyterian, but whose whole family, through the influence of his second wife, are devotedly attached to that phasis of religious belief and worship, which abjures the taint of Protestantism and begs to be called Anglo-Catholic. Her elder sister,

Edith, a model of formalistic piety, has signalized herself by a clandestine marriage, a subsequent elopement, and then a wedding in full pomp ecclesiastic, having maintained her principle unimpaired through the whole transaction; for the Eucharist has hallowed what else might have been folly, and the confessional has at once smothered and sanctified the great secret of her girlhood. The dearest hope of her household circle is that Alice may grow up like her, and the maiden gives the most ample promise of emulating in manifold excellencies the sister whom she already surpasses in personal beauty.

After their hydropathic experiences, Frederic and Alice

next meet and interchange greetings at the Cathedral service in Milan; and their unaccountable intimacy at a ball the same evening obliges her to disclose to her mother the secret of their first acquaintance. Her parents intend that she shall marry the Marquis of Wessex, a superannuated roué of twenty-seven, whose leaden stupidity and stolid jealousy are excessively annoying, till toward the close of the story, he develops an heroic type of rascality, of which we were not prepared to find him capable. This worthy is one of the family party, in which Alice crosses the Alps. On this journey, she is thrown by a series of accidents into close intimacy with a certain Countess de Schönberg, who purports to be the wife of a distinguished continental diplomatist. Wessex is led by this lady to profess a guilty passion for her, while Alice's waiting-maid is so concealed, that she may see and hear what passes, and report it to her mistress. She afterwards relates to Alice the story of her life; and the author more than intimates that she thus, (and not unconsciously,) lays upon Alice's shoulders the expiation of her own follies and sins, so that an innocent person "paid the debt of personal humiliation, social banishment, and soul-piercing shame, owed by another." Nor is this vicarious expiation a mere freak of fortune, but "the genuine idea which, in the contemplation of faith, replaces the destiny that pursued the house of Atreus," and replaces it very much for the worse.

It seems that Madame de Schönberg was the second cousin of the Cliffords, but by a mother and grandmother who had not found it convenient to sanction their maternity by the rights of wedlock. She herself has been an unwedded mother, and Augustus Clifford her partner in guilt, or more properly her dupe. After the death of her child, and a variety of adventures in which she seems to have been perpetually dogged by a bad reputation, she had put herself in readiness to marry Count Schönberg, an old man of seventy; but, for some reason which she declines explaining, she had changed her mind; yet, to spare his feelings, had consented to bear his name and pass as his wife before the world. This disgusting recital concluded, "Alice laughed outright," and said, “then you are really an unmarried girl, like myself!"

The next important incident is the marriage of Augustus, now Lord Beauchamp, in Venice, to a masked woman, who

invites him to two successive nocturnal interviews in her gondola, with the purpose, as she says, of asking him to marry her; but whom he, captivated at first hearing, anticipates by proposing to her. Immediately after the nuptial ceremony, she, still unseen, leaves him, "it may be for years," as she says; and, though a reader of the bluntest perception sees at once through the sham, he does not know whom he has married till after the lapse of some months, and on the very evening of the opportune death of Count Schönberg, whose Protean widow thenceforward appears as Lady Beauchamp.

Prior to this fatal event, the dramatis personæ are all spending the fashionable season in London, and in their mutual proximity the plot thickens. At a ball given at Lennox house, to celebrate Alice's birthday, she invites Frederic to waltz with her, and then leads him to the conservatory for a mutual declaration of love in full form. To discuss the matter still farther, she takes him into the chapel, and there tells him that she will not marry a Romanist, expounding to him with rather more frankness than delicacy some of her reasons, and for others referring him to her uncle, the Reverend Herbert Courtenay. After parting with him, she falls asleep on a sofa, and, on being awakened by a kiss from her waiting maid, (transformed into a companion and friend by the discovery that she is half-sister of the apocryphal Madame de Schönberg,) she exclaims, "Frederic still here!" Only confidential persons, it is supposed, are present; yet this piquant bit of scandal transpires through the gay world, and finds its way into the public prints, leading shortly to the discovery of the traitor in the person of the butler Matson, who is in fact the elder, though unacknowledged, brother of Wessex, and plays a prominent part in the sequel of the story. Meanwhile Wessex has abandoned the pursuit of Alice, has become affianced to the sister of the Cliffords, and is exposed as a false and worthless man at the very ball at his own house, given for the express purpose of announcing his matrimonial arrangements.

Herbert Courtenay now undertakes the conversion of Frederic, who, finding that he can carry all his idols with him into the Anglican church, is easily reconciled to the change, and of course is cordially recognized as the future husband of Alice.

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