The Ingham Papers. Some Memorials of the Life of Captain Frederic Ingham, U. S. N. Sometime Pastor of the First Sandemanian Church in Naguadavick, and Major-General by Brevet in the Patriot Service in Italy
By . Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co. 1869.
IN this volume there is less of “the light that never was on sea or land ” than there was in “If, Yes, and Perhaps ” ; but there is still so much of the peculiar charm of the author’s imagination, that from a glance at any page one would know the book for his. The original, almost unique color of his thought, so strongly imparted to all he does, gives the attraction of his better to his slighter efforts. We are not sure that we were defensible interested in the paper on “Good Society,”or that we have anything to say in excuse for having read it through except that it reminded us in so many ways of wonderfully good things that we had hardly any choice. We perceive now, with proper contrition, that it is not quite worthy of the company it is in; though “Paul Jones and Denis Duval” may not be too good for it. This magazine stands in such a relation to most of these productions, that it should not perhaps express any feeling of preference. Yet we own to a partiality for “ Did he take the Prince to Ride?” and “How Mr. Frye would have preached it ” ; and, if we must be quite frank, we think rather modestly of “ The Good-Natured Pendulum.” This is not saying, however, that we do not consider it vastly better and brighter than anything published the same month in any other magazine, or that we should be greatly surprised to find that it was generally better liked than cither of the papers we have named. Readers are very uncertain, and apt to have ideas, or at least likes or dislikes, of their own.
“The Rag-Man and the Rag-Woman” is almost as good as “How Mr. Frye would have preached it”; the one deals with a question as to the means of living, and the other with the deepest concerns of life, but it would be hard to say in which the author has most ingeniously displayed his peculiar invention, or in which he has most lightly and triumphantly presented his moral. In “ Round the World in a Hack,” and in “ Did he take the Prince to Ride ? " we have delightful studies of the old Boston and the new; and wc must refuse to make choice between them. While it is pretty certain that nobody ever did or could make a voyage round the world in a back, it is quite possible that Haliburton may have taken the Prince of Wales to ride, so the balance of probability is in favor of the latter sketch. Still, of the former it must he remembered how great a value there is in the fantastic. If Poe could have come back, without his Black Gat and his Raven, he might have done some parts of “Round the World in a Hack”; but wc cannot imagine Poe having been born in Boston, and there the likeness between the two writers fails,—so much of the good of the paper comes of Mr. Hale’s being Boston born. It would fail also in the quality of the persons introduced, Poe’s spectres, being always grotesque or terrible, and Mr. Hale’s being always men and women, who, like people in dreams, take the oddest incidents and situations in the most matter-of-fact way, and are not the least dismayed by impossibility.
The papers which form this volume are akin only in spirit, and are as various in topic as the Rev. Captain Ingham has been in vocation. Mr. Hale seems to have felt that some connected notice of this gentleman’s career was due to the reader, and th6 “ Memoir " is one of the pleasantest things in the book, which is so full of pleasant things, — humor in airy tricks of allusion and innuendo, the achievements oi a restless imagination turning everything to fantastic account, and the faculty of again transmuting these caprices into lessons oi the plainest and most practical effect. Having said so much, we should lie no true critic if we failed to add that the conversational tone of the papers is occasionally a little too lifelike, and that the talk now and then seems to run on fora while without seeming to come to much, as the liveliest talk will do, but the liveliest literature should not.