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it,“of everything from a lord chancellor to a sheriffs officer.” Foochow was one of the forts opened to trade by the treaty of 1842, and Mr Alcock, as he then was, had to maintain an entirely new position with the Chinese authorities. In so doing he was eminently successful, and earned for himself promotion to the consulate at Shanghai. Thither he went in 1846, and made it an especial part of his duties to superintend the establishment and laying out of the British settlement, which has developed into such an important feature of British commercial life in China. In 1858 he was appointed consulgeneral in the newly-opened empire of Japan, and in the following year was promoted to be minister plenipotentiary. In those days residence in Japan was surrounded with many dangers, and the people were intensely hostile to foreigners. In 1860 Mr Alcock’s native interpreter was murdered at the gate of the Legation, and in the following year the Legation was stormed by a body of Ronins, whose attack was repulsed by Mr Alcock and his staff. Shortly after this event he returned to England on leave. Already he had been made a C.B. (1860), and in 1862 he was made a knight commander of the order. Two years later he returned to Japan, and after a year’s further residence he was transferred to Peking, where he represented the British Government until 1871, when he retired. But though no longer in official life his leisure was fully occupied. He was for some years president of the Royal Geographical Society, and he served on many commissions. He was twice married, first in May 1841 to Henrietta Mary, daughter of Charles Bacon, Esq., who died in 1853, and secondly (8th July 1862) to the widow of the Rev. John Lowder, who died on 13th March 1899. He was the author of several works, but the one by which he will be known is The Capital of the Tycoon, which appeared in 1863. He died in London on 2nd November 1897. (r. k. d.)
parts of the United States, or addressed groups of hearers as they invited him. These “ conversations,” as he called them, were more or less informal talks on a great range of topics, spiritual, aesthetic, and practical, in which he emphasized the ideas of the school of American Transcendentalists led by Emerson, who was always his supporter and discreet admirer. He dwelt upon the illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with the Creative Spirit; upon the spiritual and poetic monitions of external nature; and upon the benefit to man of a serene mood and a simple way of life. As regards the trend and results of Alcott’s philosophic teaching, it must be said that, like Emerson, he was sometimes inconsistent, hazy, or abrupt. But though he formulated no system of philosophy, and seemed to show the influence now of Plato, now of Kant, or of German thought as filtered through the brain of Coleridge, he was, like his American master, associate, and friend, steadily optimistic, idealistic, individualistic. The teachings of William Ellery Channing, a little before, as to the sacred inviolability of the human conscience — anticipating the later conclusions of Martineau—really lay at the basis of the work of most of the Concord Transcendentalists and contributors to The Dial, of whom Alcott was one. In his last years, living in a serene and beautiful old age in his Concord home, where every comfort was provided by his daughter Louisa (q.v.), Alcott was gratified at being able to become the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a Concord summer school of philosophy, in which—in a rudely-fashioned building next his house—thoughtful listeners were addressed, during a part of several successive summer seasons, on many themes in philosophy, religion, and letters. Of Alcott’s published works the most important is Tablets (1868); next in order of merit is Concord Days (1872). His Sonnets and Canzonets, 1882, are chiefly interesting as an old man’s experiments in verse. He left a great and symmetrical collection of Alcott, Amos Bronson (1799-1888), Ameri- personal jottings and memorabilia, most of which remain can educationalist and writer, was born in Wolcott, unpublished. He died in Boston, 4th March 1888. Connecticut, 29th November 1799. His father was a (c. F. R.) farmer and mechanic, Joseph Chatfield Alcox, whose ancestors, then bearing the name of Alcocke, had settled Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888), during the in eastern Massachusetts in early colonial days. The last quarter of the 19th century the favourite American external events in Amos Bronson Alcott’s long life were, author of juvenile stories (especially for girls), was the for the most part, simple and unimportant. Self-educated daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, and though of New in youth, and early thrown upon his own resources, he England parentage and residence, was born in Germanbegan to earn his living by peddling books and merchan- town, Pennsylvania, 29th November 1832. She began dise in Virginia, afterward teaching in that state and in work at an early age as teacher and writer, and was an other southern states. Determined to devote himself to amateur nurse in army hospitals during the civil war of educational work, in 1828 he opened, in Boston, a school 1861-65. Her newspaper letters, collected as Hospital which became locally famous because of his original Sketches (1863), displayed some power of observation and methods; his plan being to develop self-instruction on record; while Moods, a novel (1864), despite its uncerthe basis of self-analysis, with an ever-present desire on his tainty of method and of touch, indicated the possibility own part to stimulate the child’s personality. The feature that Miss Alcott might develop into a strong novelist of of his school which attracted most attention, perhaps, character, with a sympathetic insight into the deeper was his scheme for the teacher receiving punishment, in springs of vital action. She soon turned, however, certain circumstances, at the hands of an offending pupil, to the rapid production of stories for girls, and, with whereby the sense of shame might be quickened in the the exception of the cheery tale entitled Work (1873), mind of the errant child. The school was not pecuniarily and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles successful, although Alcott had won the affection of some (1877), which attracted little notice, she did not return of his pupils, and his educational experiments had to the more ambitious fields of the novelist. Her success challenged the attention of students of pedagogy. After a dated from the appearance of the first series of Little visit to England, in 1842, he founded, with two English Women: or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (1868), in which, associates, at “ Fruitlands,” in the town of Harvard, with unfailing humour, freshness, and lifelikeness, she Massachusetts, a communistic experiment at farm-living put into story form many of the sayings and doings of and nature-meditation, as tending to develop the best herself and her sisters. Little Men (1871) similarly powers of body and soul. This speedily came to naught, treated the character and ways of her nephews, in that and Alcott subsequently took up his home near Emerson, house in Concord, Massachusetts, in which Miss Alcott’s in Concord, Massachusetts, and spoke, as opportunity industry had now established her parents and other memoffered, before the “lyceums” then common in various bers of the Alcott family; but most of her later volumes,
