There is not much left for him to do now, but to look on at the Revolutions of 1848; to re-write an ancient system of assurance; to edit for a few months

3

small, ill-supported commercial paper in Hamburgh; to. sketch Louis Philippe, expose Guizot, ridicule the grave senators of Hamburgh, and write his memoirs.

But his wings are losing their power; the albatross sweeps no more wearilessly over continents and oceans; the eyes are growing dull, the flights are short and painful, and from one near point to another and so back and forward, back and forward until the end shall come. The friends of his youth are all gone; he turns from the dark angel who is drawing near, and looks back upon the sunny fields and the empurpled vineyards; but no bright faces woo him there; no loving voices greet him; and perhaps, God knows, let us hope so, perhaps there are tears in the eyes of the old cosmopolite, and long-forgotten tendernesses renewing their youth in his heart. He is to-day alone, fluttering between Hamburgh and Paris, and seventyfive years old.

But I declare that this American German Italian, who has been a merchant in Marseilles and a soldier in New Orleans; an army purveyor in Paris and a machine agent in London; a player in Hamburgh,

and author in Trieste; who has negoti ated loans in Rome and caught green turtle on Bahama Banks; who has dealt with monks of San Lorenzo and Greeks of Odessa; who has sailed in a gondola and a flat-boat; who has dwelt in Stamboul without smoking a nargileh, and in Naples without seeing the sun; who has been on the Florida Reefs and in the Queen's Bench prison, and has had a suit in chancery; who has seen a volcano in Sicily, and felt an earthquake in Louisville; who is equally familiar with the Danube, the Seine, and the Mississippi; who conspired with Biddle; who has known Napoleon, James Gordon Bennett, Queen Victoria, Gen. Jackson, Admiral Coffin, Ameriga Vespucci, Chantrey, Louis Philippe, Mehemet Ali, Jefferson, Madame de Genlis, Delaroche, Talleyrand, Lafayette, Fulton, Audubon, Ferdinand of Austria and Mr. Codman of Marblehead, Massachusetts; who can paint, compose music, write prose and verse, combine a speculation, make love to a Lorette; who begins his autobiography with a joke on his mother and ends it by ridiculing the Senate of Hamburgh, along whose pages pass Presidents and Emperors and Kings; merchants, dames high and low, and none of them unscathedI declare I say that this man is a true Cosmopolite.

OCR

UR title suggests something free and expansive a sort of general distribution of the editorial personage over the field of thought a wandering hither and thither in our own balloon-a sailing and floating through the spacious realms of imagination, with nothing to guide us but our own free will, and nothing upon the earth to limit us. We revel in the liberty. We are, as Mr. Moore, that good Poet and bad man, would say, great, glorious and free." We bear no chains. Space is a trifle to us, and we would just as soon pay our addresses to The Living Buddha in Llassà, or the respectable and pot-bellied Fo in Pekin, as not. It is quite indifferent to us where we go, or what we say. With an editorial yawn and a stretch of the shoulders, we are ready for anything. Say! what shall it be? Shall we trim our sails, and float over the Southern seas? Spicy winds blow there, and cool groves strive to mirror their fresh greenness in the greener seas. Nutty-skinned Fayaways leap from pointed rocks into the parting and modest waves; Palmplumes nod over the liquid arena, and bestow upon the swimming jousts a courtly and royal air; Dolphins, with their scaly tabards, are the heralds of the sport; Tritons blow from their conchshells the peals to charge, and the wise and wondrous Babbalanja sits on high with a holiday suit of tappa embroidered in colored grasses, as a prize for the victor swimmer!

Or shall we saddle our desert steed? The yellow seas of sand spread out before us. Rift after rift rises in amber billows that the hoofs of our nedjidi shall cleave. The shadows of Nimrod and Rameses fall largely and solemnly athwart the awful ocean. Camels with long and arched necks like the prows of the ancient triremes, steer swiftly across the plain. Long caravans, fleet-like, defile along the horizon, and the peaked summits of the Pyramids fall as the shadows of impreg nable fortresses towards us as we gaze! Shall we journey with the Howadji, and tear from out the East the secret of the sun?

Then there are bazaars of Damascus yet unexplored. Cool interiors filled with rare spices and rich brocades. Grave merchants there are to talk to, in sentences that float in a sea of pauses, and the narghilly to inhale; through whose

sinuous tube the tobacco of Lebanon courses into the lungs, and so thrills with a calm delight all the interior being. Marble floors, across which flit in gay garments the dusky slaves; trembling of fountains on the air, that lull the spirit like the continuous, yet broken chords of the æolian harp; scent of myrtles that steal like the sweet enfranchised soul of some expired flower through the halls, as if unknowing where to rest; while without, the busy ones chaffer, and bargain, and pass to and fro, and we lie tranced too far within, to be distracted with their moneyed talk. Speak! shall we join him who ate of the wondrous weed hasheesh, and dream the days away in wild foreshadowings of the future?

The present time, say you, O Dimes! the present time and present place is that on which you love to linger? Broadway is more to you than the painted alleys of Damascus. The surf that bursts on Coney Island you affect more readily than those cool coves in which Melville and Fayaway performed their natatory exploits. The Pyramids are as dirt heaps in your sight, when compared with the Croton reservoir, and we doubt not but the Howadji would swoon gracefully, if he heard of your preference for the Long Island plains above the desert. Nay, you are even bold enough to say that the four cent Noriegas of which you consume several each day, are much to be preferred before the water-purified fumes of the Syrian weed.

We have a respect for you, O Dimes, and an admiration for your family. We know the ancient and distinguished ancestry from whose dust the roots of your genealogical tree are nourished. We recognize and are grateful for what the Dimese's have done for our Country, and therefore is it, that we hasten to gratify your desire and strive to confine our rambles within your favorite limits. We will send our desert steed back to his stable and his oats-candor compels us to admit that he was hired from a livery man for the occasion-we will fill our case with your four cent Noriegas, and consign our Persian water-pipe back to the bar-room from which we borrowed it; and if we bathe, we will endeavor to forget Typee, and dream of Hoboken.

Where shall we go, and what shall we talk about, O Dimes? We are consuined with the desire of instructing your mind

and improving your morals. We long to be a virtuous Asmodeus to your Don Cleofas, and float with you over cities, and study mankind for your especial edification. What house shall we unroof? What heart shall we unveil? Of what scandal shall we gossip? There is a fine field opened to our inspection in Wall street, just now. Panics, fatal as the Sansar wind, rush to and fro, and at their icy breath colossal speculators crumble into dust. Friend eyes friend askance. Stockholders are insulted on change by suspicious inquiries as to the validity of the securities offered for sale. Merchants hasten to their lawyers, and make preparations for getting out the first judgment against houses rumored to be shaky. Directors of Companies sit trembling in their offices, awaiting the awful reports of committees on their books, which shall disclose unheard-of hypothecations. And a mournful but vivid picture rises up before us of a lonely, conscience-stricken man speeding away through Canadian forests, while in his ears ring the execrations of the multitude whom his recklessness has ruined.

After all, the dishonest man must be pitied rather than persecuted. What future is left for that unhappy director of the New Haven Railroad? We will suppose that he has managed to take fifty or a hundred thousand dollars away with him; where can he enjoy it? He rushes off, say to Algiers; purchases a house, changes his name, and determines to forget the past and be happy. He can never escape from his memory and his fears. His door never opens to a visitor without causing him a throb of terror, lest it may be some avenging creditor on his track. A ship never arrives, no matter from what port, that he is not irresistibly impelled to read the passenger list, racked all the while with hideous suspense, and relieved only when he finds no name that he knows in the record. This continual brooding over one subject soon preys upon his health. Even the inhabitants of the town, who only know him as a Mr. Smith in easy circumstances, gather by some subtle magnetic penetration, the dim consciousness that he is not all right. They see him walking along the shady side of the street, his back bent, and his steps undecided and irregular. His head is bowed and his eyes are never still. Restlessly they seek the countenance of every passer-by, are fixed for a moment, and then withdrawn. If a step sounds behind him, you notice

a sudden contraction of the body, as if shrinking from some invisible touch. The head is partially raised with an intense expression of watchfulness; then, as if no longer able to control his terrible curiosity, he gives a rapid glance over his shoulder, sees no one but a French soldier, and with a faint sigh of relief resumes his walk. Some day, however, when he has grown very grey, and has almost begun to charin his conscience into a sleep, with the belief that he is for ever safe from recognition, Trimmins of Wall street suddenly passes him, looks round after him, evinces a perfect recollection of him, but does not bow, nor say "How are you?" The poor defaulter returns home in an agony. He knows that Trimmins will tell every one the particulars of his past life, and all the little local friendships he was just beginning to form will be utterly destroyed. Trimmins does tell everybody the history of the supposed Mr. Smith. Trimmins having left New York himself in rather a hasty manner, owing to the peculiar style in which he kept his accounts when cashier of the Croton Bank, is, of course, merciless to the guilty Smith. Trimmins, defaulted only for a hundred thousand dollars; while Smith over-issued three millions of stock. Consequently, by comparison, Trimmins looks upon himself as innocence itself, and his little peculation as positively virtuous, when contrasted with Smith's monstrous coup. Besides, Trimmins don't intend to stay in Algiers. He is merely passing through, and as he has got the start of the New York papers, he gratifies himself by being for a while a virtuous swaggerer, and crushes poor Smith's reputation with the same ferocity, that a woman of slightly doubtful reputation simulates, and perhaps feels, towards some poor girl, who has not had the same prudence in concealing the evidences of her wickedness. Thus Smith discovers that in the nineteenth century there is no concealment for the criminal. Too old to pitch his tent elsewhere, avoided by every one and worn out with remorse, Smith at last dies, and—

A lesson for you, O Dimes! when in course of time you become a director of the Nebraska Railroad!

But let us leave the region of dollars, and hypothecated stocks. Let us fly from that defaulting street; let us eschew bankers and directors, bulls and bears, and hover over some lighter and more graceful topic. There's the opera! Dimes, thou Apollo of the boxes, does