"There is enjoyment in a call on an artist in his studio, provided you know him well enough to rummage his portfolios, or turn his canvases from the wall while he continues at work. Unless you are on these terms with him, you have no business to interrupt an artist, except on invitation, and on ceremonial or penal occasions; as, for instance, when Podgers, A. R. A., has expressed in writing the pleasure it will give him to see you for inspection of his pictures intended for the Academy on the 3rd, 4th, or 5th of April. That is one of the penal performances. If you go, you must make one of a shoal of people, who flock into the place on each other's heels the whole day through, most of them knowing nothing of art. The few who do, are de barred by politeness from speaking their mind on the works before them, where they cannot honestly approve; but they are all pouring out the same commonplaces of compliment to Podgers's face, and venturing on 'shys' of criticism whenever the poor man's back is turned, while poor Podgers is beaming about, full of himself, feeding on honey and butter, and believing all the compliments sincere in spite of his better judgment--so sweet is praise-till the Times comes out, the day after the Private View, and omits all mention of Podgers, or damns him with faint praise, or cuts him up, perhaps, root and branch.

"But the real penance of penances is that social performance called 'leaving cards. Every day, when I come home from my office, I find my hall-table littered with these pieces of pasteboard. There is a physiognomy about them. Take the newly-married card, for instance, on which Mr. and Mrs. Coobiddy always figure in couples, a sort of connubial four-poster among the pack; or Captain Blunderbore's card-the most tiny and lady-like square of glazed pasteboard, with letters so small, they almost require the help of a magnify. ing glass to make them out; or Lady Mangelwurzel's solid and substantial ticket, heavy as her ladyship's jointure, the letters square as her bank account, and as firmly impressed on the paper as her ladyship's dignity and importance on her mind. Here is the pasteboard representative of lively Mrs. Marabout-limp, light, spider-charactered, engraved in Paris; and here mediævally-minded Mr. Pyxon has stamped

himself in Gothic characters as difficult to decipher as the directions to strangers in the New Houses of Parliament.

"But what is the meauing of this pack of pasteboard from the Juggernauts ? Why has Mr. Juggernaut left two cards, and Mrs. Juggernaut two cards, and Miss Juggernaut two cards, and Mr. Frederick Juggernaut two cards? And why are they all turned up at one corner? The Juggernauts are the most determined doers of social penance I know. This shower of cards is meant to represent a visit from every individual member of their family to every individual member of mine. Well, if it have saved us from an affliction of the Juggernauts in person, let us be thankful. These pasteboard proxies are blessed inventions, after all. There could be only one thing better: to get rid of the printed pasteboard-even as we have got rid of the human buckram it represents. call upon each other-O my brethren and sisters-you who bore me-you whom I bore--even in pasteboard! Why not drop it altogether-and live apart? People who care for each other will find time and opportunity to meet, I will answer for it. Why should those who do not pine in a self-inflicted and superfluous suffering? Think what you are exposing yourselves and me to. I or my wife might be at home when you call. We might all have to endure half-an-hour of each other-a constrained, unhappy half-hour, of baffled attempts at keeping our mask from slipping on one side, and showing the yawns, and flat melancholy behind them.

Why

"Then this penance is not merely painful in itself. It costs time and money.

"One morning in every three weeks or so, I find my wife at her writing-table, struggling with the Red-Book and the Map of London. She is making out her lists of calls, she tells me. These lists are in duplicate. One is for her own guidance, the other for the driver of the Brougham, which is hired for the day's penance. There is a sovereign for that, including the tip to the driver. Of course, can't be expected to make her calls in a cab.

she

"I once, out of curiosity, accompanied my unhappy wife on one of these penal rounds of hers. I never saw more suffering, of various kinds, condensed into six hours. First, there is the consideration of

the route-by what line the greatest number of calls could be got through in the least time, with the greatest economy of ground. This settled with the driver, begins the painful process itself, in Tyburnia -let us say-or Belgravia, or the regions around Bedford Square-if one dare own to acquaintances in that quarter,

"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow?

“You reach No. 1 on your list: a pull at the check-string: ten to one the driver has overshot the door: he turns round: descends: knocks: the door is opened: 'Mrs. Harris not at home-of course: your cards are dropped: drive on to No. 2: driver has a difficulty about the street: this you discuss and finally settle with him through the front window: drive a hundred yards: check-string again: knock: door opened: not at home: card dropped as before then on to No. 3: and so the weary routine goes on from one o'clock till six. Of course, there are episodes of peculiar dreariness. Sometimes Mrs. Harris is at home, and being at home, has neglected to say that she is not. If you have rashly asked the formal question, you must go in, and the pasteboard performance is turned into the real penance of a bona fide call. Or your coachman is stupid, and keeps turning up wrong streets: or cannot read, and invariably stops at the wrong numbers: or is obstinate, and has a theory of his own as to the order in which the houses on your list are to be taken, and so forth.

"The worst of all, as I have already said, is when the people called upon happen to be at home. This chance has to be faced at every house, and adds seriously to the day's unhappiness. I shall not soon forget my wife's face of consternation when, on dropping her cards at the address of our dreary old friend, Mrs. Boreham, who is at once deaf, curious, and ill-natured the servant who took the cards, instead of shutting the door as usual, advanced to the carriage--' Good Gracious!' exclaimed my wife, in a voice of dismay, 'She's at home!'

"Mrs. Boreham at home?' she inquired the next moment, with the blandest smile.

"No, ma'am,' was the answer; 'but she told me to say, if you called, she was going to Brighton for a month.'

"God bless her!' rapped out my wife. The footman thought the ejaculation one of pious affection. Under this impression he might well look astonished. Had he understood the words in their true senseas an utterance of thankfulness that his mistress was out of the way-he would, probably, have said 'Amen,' for Mrs. B.'s hand is heavy on her household. I have never joined my wife in a day of visitingalways paying bills for lots of cards, and penance since that morning. But I am

the Brougham forms a serious item in our quarterly accounts.

"But after all it is not so much the waste of money and time that irritates one as the hollowness of the business. If these lying pasteboards must be deposited, why not dispatch them by post, like tradesmen's circulars? I hear that some fine ladies do send round their maids on this penance. I applaud them for it. I have serious thoughts of insisting on my wife's employing the crossing-sweeper-who does our confidential errands extraordinary-to deliver her cards. He is a most trustworthy man, and would be thankful for the day's work, for which he might be fitted out respectably in one of my old suits.

"This groan, I feel, ought, by rights, to have come not from me, but from my wife. It is the poor women, especially, who have to do this penance. But we men suffer from it in twenty ways, besides the direct ones of money out of pocket, and a wife's time abstracted from home and home duties. The huge lie it embodies works all through society. This pasteboard acquaintance invites and is invited. To it I owe the splendid dullness of many dinners every season-the heat and weariness of many crushes under the name of drums, routs, concerts, and so forth--the necessity of bowing and smiling to, and professing a sort of interest in the concerns of hundreds of people I don't care a rap for. Thanks to it, in short, I perform an uncounted number of journeys in that prison-van I have already alluded to, in whose stifling cells we most of us pass so much of our unhappy lives, on our way, self-condemned that we are, to hard labor on the Social Tread-mill.

"When shall we have the courage to put down this instrument of torture, as we have

had the good sense to abolish its infinitely less heart-breaking prison-equivalent ? "I am, Mr. Punch, "Yours, respectfully,

"A SUFFERER."

The death of Alfred de Musset reminds us, as we look from Our Window, of soft spring nights in Paris, when Madame Allan played his proverbes at the Français, with exquisite grace; and, more sadly, it adds another to the list of talent early gone astray and lost. The following notice is from the London Leader, and touches with the gentleness of friendship the frailties of genius:

"In the midst of a dry heap of diplo matic and political news in the Times of last Tuesday, appeared the following short paragraph:

"M. Alfred de Musset, one of the youngest and most distinguished members of the French Academy, died yesterday, after a short illness."

Two paces of the vilest earth are all that remains even to a King when once the breath is out of his body; and two, or at the most three, lines are all that can be spared to a poor poet-a mere child of grace and genius, whose lamp of life is shattered, and whose light in the dust lies dead-when the movements of a Grand Duke and of the Crédit Mobilier have columns at their service. Nevertheless, as it is the fashion of Courts to go in mourning for their great ones, we may be allowed in this place to offer, from beyond the sea, the last tribute of respect to the memory of a poet. Alfred de Musset was one of those children of a summer star,' who lose their way early in this busy world of harsh and cold realitics; who drain the wine of life with fevered lips to the very dregs, exhaust the bitter and the sweet of love, and awake from disenchantment to despair. His last volume of minor poems was published in 1850, and in those few pages there was nothing that bore a later date than '39-'42.

6

"To him. as to many other greater men, the reward of fame came late. For many years he had been treated by the serious critics as a trifler; and although his Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, his Spectacle dans un Fauteuil, and his exquisite lyrics were the delight of women and of young men ;

success

although his life had enough of romance in it to be interesting, it was not until about ten years ago that the singular success of one of his Proverbes (Le Caprice) gave a sudden lustre to his name. Two or three more of his Proverbes were subsequently performed at the Français-I ne faut jurer de rien, Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, and his dramatic pieces, La Quenoville de Barberine, Les Caprices de Marianne with a belonging rather to the poet than to the dramatist, as the failure of the drama, Andre del Sarto, a fine subject wasted, clearly proved. It was one thing to compose with a diamond pen a Proverbe, and another to construct a drama of sustained interest and passion. We incline to believe, that it will be for his minor poems that Alfred de Musset will be remembered. In these, the passionate warmth of color, the reckless elegance, the mocking grace, the almost feminine languor and inconstancy of humor smiling through tears, are infinitely charming. The influence of Byron upon the young countryman of Voltaire is easily perceived, but enough remains of individuality to give the poet a personal rank. His election into the Academy was especially remarked at the time, as it was almost a single instance of pure literature being admitted by the disbanded senators who fill the benches of that august body, and conspire in choice language against the Order that is not of their making. No doubt, his literary title to academic election was a sound one. A romanticist by habit and association, he was always a rigid classicist in theory. But poor Alfred de Musset was not at home in the Palais Mazarin; and, indeed, wherever he appeared of late, it was as a ghostly visitant from some débraillé world. way of life had become perplexed in the extreme; silent and shattered was that fragile lute

His

"On whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander, a bright

stream

Once fed with many-voiced waves, a dream Of youth which night and time have quenched forever!""

"Peace be with him! As he wrote of a brother poet of Italy, Leopardi-

"L'heure dernière vint, tant de fois appelée. Tu la vis arriver sans crainte et sans remord, Et tu goûtas enfin le charme de la mort.

pure and beautiful, that the Indians called it Horicon, Cx Sc or silver water; and, as it stretches away from Lake Champlain, they also named it Caniderioit, or the tail of the lake. But the pious French Jesuits, who had settled upon the shores of Champlain, and used the VOL. X.-10

silver water in baptism, called it San Sacrament, the lake of the holy sacrament. Then came the loyal English, and called it Lake George. It is a

sweet Saxon name, and, on the whole, we are fortunate; for another king, with another name, might have sat upon the throne-Jeremiah, or Thaddeus, or Abimelech, for instance, or worse.

Of course you have been, or will go, to Lake George. And of course you will compare it with Como, and the Swiss lakes, and the English and Scotch lakes. But it is not necessary to do so. All sheets of water among mountains have a general resemblance; and when, as in the Tyrol, great glaciers lean down the precipices from off the

awful peaks, and lap the dark, deep waters, there is a solemn grandeur of impression, which lasts as long as life.

But Lake George is all loveliness, and beauty, and repose. It seems to have been unavoidable, to call it silver water, or Lake Sacrament. A summer benediction breathes over it. If you want rest and peace, with sweet air, capital fare, and enough crinoline and kid-glove to keep your gentility in countenance, turn away from Saratoga, and slip up to Lake George. Or if, after the rude grandeur of the White Hills, you wish a lovely contrast, slide along the railroad to Lake Champlain, and then glide along that lake, and float upon Horicon. Then you can go on to Saratoga, and emancipate yourself from nature entirely.

On some lovely summer morning, bid adieu to the belles in ravishing negligés, to the beaux in coats comme il faut, to the bowling, the billiards, the lake-dinners, the music of the afternoon, the

hop of the evening, the cigar, and the cobbler of midnight; leave these at Saratoga, to find as many of them as you please at Lake George,

You step out of the garden of the "United States" into the cars. An hour of rattling and puffing, and pleasant level landscape, brings you to the Morean station. Get a seat upon the top of the stage; and be sure to have a poet on one side of you, and a wit on the other; then bowl along through a wild country over a good plank road, peering through the trees, glancing over the glittering fields of grain, rejoicing in the bright summer air and your liberty, until you rein up at Glenn's Falls, seventeen miles from Saratoga.

These falls are a rocky pass in the Hudson, about fifty-five miles from Albany. The whole descent is some seventy feet; but the slope is very long, and jagged with bold rocks and the water pours, and foams, and gurgles, and seethes in bubbly whirpools at