Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/771

1867.] , for the applause of the town, night after night, for long years. William Warren, comedian and manager, died in a hale, prosperous old age, almost in sight of the theatre, while old Joe Jefferson, his long-time comrade, true to his love for nature in the evening of his days as in their morning, turning his back upon the tinsel of the stage and the gloom of the city, took up his staff, and wandered away to where the fields were green and the birds sang; and so wandering, he came at last to a little village among the mountains of Pennsylvania, where rippled the blue waters of the Susquehanna; and there he rested for a while, died, and was laid away in a favorite corner of a little churchyard; and ten years after John Bannister Gibson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, came to the grave of his old friend, laid thereon a decent slab, and wrote for the grand old comedian an epitaph, full of beauty and feeling.

We cannot take leave of these great artists, who, no less through their "so potent art" than through the daily beauty of their lives, lend honor to the drama, without expressing the profound sense of our obligation for the pleasure they have time and again afforded us; and in this we do but echo the voices of the many thousands whom they have delighted.

The comedians are of the true knight-errantry,—they correct all errors, reward all virtue, punish all wrong, between the rise and fall of the green curtain. They are good geniuses who scatter our cares, delay the coming wrinkles that threaten our brows, and out of the plenitude of their exuberant life so gild ours with laughter that we make friends with fortune and sit down with content.

field is vast, yet we think it would be hard to find among modern publications three other books so foolish as these. They are all written in that King Cambyses vein which is agreeable to the sunny Southern mind, and which, for a few pages, amuses the Northern reader, and forever thereafter pitilessly bores him. The interest is perhaps longest sustained by Mr. Crawford, whose aberrations of mind, of morals, and of grammar are in the end less tedious than the fourth-rate sentimentality and sprightliness of Mr. Hunt, or the unsparingly eloquent patriotism of Mr. Ellis. Mr. Crawford tells us that for seven years before the opening of the war he was a clerk in the Treasury Department at Washington. When the Rebellion began, he resigned before the oath of allegiance could be offered him, and he exults somewhat that, though other Southern-minded clerks took the oath, "their truculency [sic] did not save them." He went South, and got a place in the Confederate Treasury,—where, if the pay was insecure, there could not have been a great deal of work; and later he joined Mosby's command. He is not a man capable of writing the history he attempts, and his book is not an intelligible narration of events. It is nothing, indeed, but a confused reminiscence of the forays of Mosby and his men,—now upon helpless Union farmers, now upon small detached bodies of Federal troops, now upon