The attitude of New York toward Mr. Theodore Thomas is a
case in point. There is among the works of the Scottish poet Alexander
Wilson, better known as the "American Ornithologist," a ballad entitled
"Watty and Meg; or, The Wife Reformed." Its moral is for all to read.
Watty's measure of domestic felicity was but scant, and when the burden
laid upon him became greater than he could bear he determined to leave the
cause of his misery:

Owre the seas I march this morning,
Listed, tested, sworn an' a',
Forced by your confounded girning.
Farewell, Meg! for I'm awa'.

In view of losing her husband and victim, Meg repented and swore to mend
her ways, conceding even Watty's stipulation to keep the family purse:

Lastly, I'm to keep the siller:
This upon your saul you swear.

Mr. Thomas gave New York no such opportunity, and she is now lamenting him
as Tom Hood's "female Ranter" mourns "The Lost Heir," "for he's my darlin'
of darlin's." She wonders why he did not continue

Sitting as good as gold in the gutter, a-playing at making dirt-pies:
I wonder he left the court, where he was better off than all the other
young boys,
With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster-shells and a dead kitten by
way of toys.

And, in truth, Mr. Thomas got little more from the city he has for
twenty-five years clung to and taught. If he came back, is it not likely
he might meet with the Lost Heir's reception? In the Scotch ballad also we
are left in uncertainty as to the genuineness of Meg's tears and promised
reform; and in any case no one can blame Mr. Thomas for announcing his
intention only after it was beyond alteration.

It is not that New York cares for the money which would have kept him.
When did it refuse money when its sympathies were aroused? Look at its
magnificent charities, its help to Chicago, to famine-stricken China, and
the thousands that were daily poured into the hands of the sufferers from
yellow fever in the South. Religion is supported with the same munificent
liberality. But when literature, music or art are to be sustained, the
community becomes either flighty or apathetic. The best of New York's
monuments are the gifts either of societies formed upon the basis of a
common sentiment with which society at large has no active sympathy, or of
men of other nationalities. It has been broadly hinted that New York would
never have acquired the Cesno