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daughter of Colonel Graham.) When she found side in religion; and he won and wore the mitre herself dying, she carried on the melancholy farce to the last. She sent for Anstis, the herald, and arranged the whole funeral ceremony with him. She was particularly anxious to see the preparations before she died. "Why," she asked, “ won't they send the canopy for me to see? Let them send it, even though the tassels are not finished." And finally, she exacted from her ladies a promise, that if she became insensible, they should not sit down in the presence of her body, till she was completely dead!

Such things told in a romance, would be criticised for their extravagance, but nothing is too extravagant for human nature. Reared in folly, pampered with self-indulgence, and bloated with vanity, the wholesome discipline of adversity would have been of infinite value to this woman and her tribe. Six months in Bridewell, varied by beating hemp, would have been the most fortunate lesson which she could have received from society.

Another of those persons, yet more remarkable for her position in life, was the second daughter of George II., the Princess Amelia. She was supposed to have been attached to the Duke of Grafton; but remaining single, and having nothing on the earth to do, she became a torment to the king, the court, and everybody. Idleness is the vice of high life, and discontent its punishment. The princess became proverbial for peevishness, sarcasm, and scandal. Of course, fashion took its revenge; and where every one was shooting an arrow, some struck, and struck deep. The princess grew masculine in her manners, and coarse in her mind. Her appointment as ranger in Richmond Park, one of those sinecure offices which are scattered among the dependants of the throne, made her enemies. Little acts of authority, such as stopping up pathways, brought the tongues of the neighboring population and gentry upon her, until her royal highness had the vexation of seeing an action brought against her. After some of the usual delays of justice, she had the mortification of being beaten, and ultimately resigned the rangership. From this period she almost disappeared from the public eye, yet she survived till 1786, dying at the age of 71.

in better style than any man of his age. His eldest son, William, was educated as a barrister; he lost his fortune in the South Sea bubble, and was sent to America as governor of New York. Subsequently he was removed to Boston, with which he was discontented, and after long altercations with the general assembly of the province, he died of a fever, probably inflamed by vexation. Gilbert, the second son, was appointed chaplain to George I., was a man of clear understanding, and exhibited his knowledge of courts by siding with Hoadley. With all the distinctions of his profession opening before him, he died young. Thomas, the third son, differed from both his brothers, in the superiority of his talents, and the wildness of his temper. The manners of the time were a mixture of vulgar riot and gross indulgence. The streets were infested with ruffianism, and a society among the young men of rank and education, which took to itself the name of "The Mohocks," and whose barbarous habits were worthy of the name, insulted alike public justice and endangered personal safety. Thomas Burnet was said to have been engaged in some of their violences, though he, perhaps, was not one of the "affiliated." It may be naturally supposed, that those excesses grieved so distinguished a man as his father; and it is equally to be supposed that they led to frequent remonstrance. If so, they operated effectively at last.

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"On a greater work than your History of the Reformation.'-My own," was the answer. "I shall be heartily glad to see it," said the father, "though I almost despair of it."

It was undertaken, however, and vigorously pursued. The young roué became a leading lawyer, and finally attained the rank of chief justice of the common pleas. He died in 1753.

There is, perhaps, in public history, no moré curious instance of the power which circumstances may place in the hands of a private individual, than the deference paid to Mrs. Clayton. Her whole merit seems to have been caution, a perpetual sense of the delicacy of her position, and an undeviating deference to the habits, opinions, and pur

but not remarkable for dignity, and rather opposed to personal amiability of mind. Yet this cautious, considerate, and frigid personage was all but worshipped by the world of fashion, of talents, and of celebrity.

Mrs. Clayton still held her quiet ascendancy, and her position was so perfectly understood, that her interest seems to have been an object of solic-poses of the queen. Those were useful qualities, itation with nearly every person involved in public difficulties. Of this kind was her intercourse with the three sons of Bishop Burnet, all individuals of intelligence and accomplishment, but all in early life struggling with fortune. The character of the bishop himself is best known from his works: gossiping, giddiness, and imprudence in taking everything for granted that he had heard, but honesty in telling it, belonged to the bishop as much as to his books. The chances of the revolution placed him in the way of preferment; chances, however, which, if they had turned the other way, might have cost him his head. But he was on the right side in politics, and not on the wrong

Among those worshippers was the man who did the most evil, and gained the most renown, of any man of his generation. The wit, who eclipsed all the witty pungency of France in his sportive sarcasm; all the libellers of royalty in his scorn of thrones; and all the grave infidelity of England, in his restless and envenomed antipathy to all religion-the memorable Voltaire.

He was then only beginning his mischievous

career, but he had already made its character suf- | fearful as the plunge was, out of that raging tor

ficiently marked to earn an imprisonment in the Bastille, and, on his liberation, an order to quit Paris.

In England he occupied himself chiefly with literature; published his "Henriade," for which he obtained a large subscription; wrote his tragedy of "Brutus," his "Philosophical Letters," and other works.

At length he was permitted to return to that spot out of which a French wit may be scarcely said to live; and kept up his intercourse with Mrs. Clayton by the following letter:

"Paris, April 18, 1729. "Madame-Though I am out of London, the favors which your ladyship has honored me with, are not, nor ever will be, out of my memory. I will remember, as long as I live, that the most respectable lady, who waits, and is a friend to the most truly great queen in the world, has vouchsafed to protect me, and receive me with kindness while I was at London.

"I am just now arrived at Paris, and pay my respects to your court, before I see our own. I wish, for the honor of Versailles, and for the improvement of virtue and letters, we could have here some ladies like you. You see, my wishes are unbounded. So is the respect and gratitude I am with, Madame, your most humble, obedient servant, "VOLTAIRE."

We pass over a thousand triflings in the subsequent pages the alarms of court ladies for the loss of a royal smile, the sickness of a favorite monkey, or the formidable "impossibility" of matching a set of old china. Such are the calam

ities of having nothing to do. We see in those pages instances of high-born men contented to linger round the court for life, performing some petty office which, however, required constant attendance on the court circle, and submitting, with many a groan, it must be confessed, to the miserable routine of trivial duties and meagre ceremonial, much fitter for their own footmen; while they left their own magnificent mansions to solitude, their noble estates unvisited, their tenantry uncheered, unprotected, and unencouraged by their residence in their proper sphere, and finally degenerated into feeble gossips, splenetic intriguers, and ridiculous encumbrances of the court itself.

Difficulty seems essential to the vigor of man. Difficulty seems essential even to the vigor of nations. The old theory, that luxury is the ruin of a state, was obviously untrue; for in no condition of the earth could luxury ever go down to the multitude. But the true evil of states is, the decay of the national activity, the chill of the national ardor, the adoption of a trifling, indolent, vegetative style of being. Into this life France had sunk, from the time of Louis XIV. Into this life Germany had sunk, from the peace of Westphalia. Into this life England was rapidly sinking, from the reign of Anne.

rent the three nations have struggled to shore, refreshed and invigorated by the struggle. England seems now to be entering on another career, more perilous than the exigencies of war-a moral and intellectual conflict, in which popular passions and rational principles will be ranged on opposite sides; and the question may involve the final shape which government shall assume in the British empire, or, perhaps, in the European world.

The characteristics of our time are wholly unshared with the past. In calling up the recollections of the great ages of English change, we can discover but slight evidence of their connecTo the stately, but religious, tion with our own. aspect of the republic of 1641, we find no resemblance in the general features of our religious tolerance. To the ardent zeal for liberty which marked the revolution of 1688, we can find no counterpart in the constitutional quietude of the present day. The fiery ferocity of continental revolution has certainly furnished no model to the professors of national regeneration, since the reform of 1830. And yet, a determination, a power and a progress of public change, is now the acknowledged principle of the most active, indefatigable, and unscrupulous portion of the mind of England.

And among the most remarkable and most menacing adjuncts of the crisis, is the singular sense of inadequacy to resist its career, which seems to paralyze the habitual defenders of the right cause. The consecrated guardians of the church seem only to wait the final blow. The great land-holders in the peerage are contented with making protests. The agricultural interest, the boast of England, and the vital interest of the empire, has abandoned a resistance, too feeble to deserve the praise of fortitude, and too irregular to deserve the fruits of victory. The moneyed interest sees its gigantic opulence threatened by a hundred-handed grasp; but makes no defence, or makes that most dangerous of all defences, which calls in the invader as the auxiliary, bribes him with a portion of the spoils, and only provokes his appetite for the possession of the whole.

This condition of things cannot last. A few years, perhaps a few months, will ripen the bitter fruit, which the meekness of undecided governments has suffered to grow before their eyes. The ballot, which offers a subterfuge for every fraud; extended suffrage, which offers a force for every aggression; the overthrow of all religious endowments, which offers a bribe to every desire of avarice-above all, that turning of religion into a political tool, that indifference to the true, and that welcoming of the false, in whatever shape it may approach, however fierce and foul; however coldly contemptuous, or furiously fanatical, however grim or grotesque, whose first act must be to trample all principle under foot, and place on its altar the worship of the passions;-those are the But the visitation came at last, at once to pun- demands which are already made, and those will ish and to stimulate. France, Germany, and be the trophies which the hands of political zealEngland were plunged into war together; and 'otry and personal rapine, in the first hour of their

triumph, will raise on the grave where lies buried | But let the song of triumph proudly swell-
the constitution.
The deathless spirit owneth not thy spell!

Yet nothing is done by the natural defenders of the rights of Englishmen. No leader comes forward; no new followers are to be found; no banner is raised as the rallying point for the fugitives, already broken. We see the approach of the evil, as the men of the old world might have seen the approach of the deluge; awaiting with folded hands, and feet rooted to the ground, the surges which nothing could resist; looking with an indolent despair at the mighty inundation, before which the plain and the mountain alike began to disappear; and sullenly submitting to an extinction, of which they had been long offered the means of escape, and perishing, with the pledge of security floating before their eyes.

We are by no means desirous of being prophets of public misfortune; but, with the tenets publicly avowed, in the elections which have just closed, with the strong popularity attached to the most daring opinions, with thirty pledged Repealers from Ireland, with the wildest doctrines of trade advocated by the popular representatives in England, with sixty subjects of the pope sitting in a Protestant legislature, and with the evident determination to bring into that legislature individuals (and who shall limit their numbers, when its doors are once thrown open to their wealth?) who pronounce Christianity itself to be an imposture we can conjecture no consequences, however hazardous, which ought not to present themselves to the soberest friend of his country. That the worst consequences may not be inevitable, is only to hope in a higher protection; that even out of the evil good may come, is not unconformable to the ways of Providence; but that times are at hand in which the noblest energy of English statesmanship will be required to meet the conflict, we have no more doubt, than that the pilot who, in a storm, uses neither compass nor sail, must run his ship on shore; or that the man who walks about in clothes dipped in pestilence, will leave his corpse as a testimony to the fact of the contagion.

THOUGHTS DURING SICKNESS.

STRENGTH, that again my weary feet may tread
The paths of life! So dark the shades which

rest

Upon my heart, that life's uncertain thread

Thrills to sad melody within my breast!—
Oh! let me view them yet-those countless springs
That seem too distant for my crippled wings!
Let me go forth! The spring's soft genial air
Calls to my spirit with an angel's voice,
Waking anew the earnest gush of prayer,

And a vain wish to mingle and rejoice

With earth's glad children, who with song and dance

Welcome the summer sun's returning glance!

How have I striven, Sickness, to unfold

The mantle with which thou hast darkly bound
My feeble tenement; but strong thy hold
On the frail victims in thy shadow found!

The trembling limbs may tell a mournful tale
Of prostrate strength, the languid eye may speak
Of fading hopes most precious though so frail,

While the still, folded hands, in posture meek,
Show that the spirit waiteth to fulfil,
Even through pain and grief, its Maker's will!
Bend to me, Father, while alone I lie,
Striving to guide my wandering thoughts to
thee!
Thou knowest how the fruitful earth, the sky,

The rush of waters and the storm-wind free,
Have been rich founts of gladness, flowing deep
Within the heart whose passions may not sleep!
Let me not love the creatures thou hast made,

Nor this fair world too proudly for my peace!
Oh, rather, when these changing prospects fade,
May all vain, earth-ward longings gently cease!
By the stern ministry of sorrow tried,
Henceforth with thee my spirit shall abide!
Boston, Mass.

MEMORY.

H. J. W. Christian Witness.

I AM an old man-very old;
My hair is thin and gray :
My hand shakes like an autumn leaf,
That wild winds toss all day.
Beneath the pent-house of my brows,
My dim and watery eyes
Gleam like faint lights within a pile,
Which half in ruin lies.

All the dull years of middle age

Have faded from my thought;
While the long-vanished days of youth
Seem ever nearer brought.
Thus often, at the sunset time,
The vales in shadow rest,
While evermore a purple glow

Gilds the far mountain's breast.

O'er happy childhood's sports and plays,
Youth's friendships, and youth's love,

I ofttimes brood in memory,

As o'er its nest the dove.
In fancy through the fields I stray,
And by the river wide,
And see a once beloved face
Still smiling at my side.

I sit in the old parlor nook,

And SHE sits near me there;

We read from the same book-my cheek
Touching her chestnut hair.

I have grown old-oh, very old!
But she is ever young,

As when through moonlit alleys green
We walked, and talked, and sung.

She is unchanged-I see her now
As in that last, last view,
When by the garden gate we took
A smiling short adieu.

Oh Death, thou hast a charmed touch,
Though cruel 't is and cold;
Embalmed by thee in memory,
Love never can grow old.

AN ENGLISHMAN UPON AMERICAN LITERA-
TURE.

[IN looking over a file of English papers received by late arrivals we encounter the following article in the London Morning Chronicle, suggested by a

great pains, in a well written dissertation, to vindicate the social development of America from these and similar imputations; but he may rest assured that, in this country at least, they were never deemed worthy a moment's attention by anybody who possessed the means of forming an opinion. Coming so late into the field as the Americans perior to that of ordinary newspaper criticisers. have done, and finding the harvest well-nigh Such articles are well calculated to foster a gener-reaped, it is rather surprising that they should ous international respect between England and the have seen so much to do, and have done it so well. United States. We copy it with pleasure.-Pic- Philosophers like Franklin and Edwards, theologians ayune.]

recent American work.

The tone of it is far su

The Prose Writers of America; with a Survey of the Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country. By RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD. -Bentley.

A volume such as this is a treasure to all who watch with eager hopefulness, and hail with joyful gratulation the daily extending triumphs of our English language. Apart from its excellence as a collection of miscellanies, and the intrinsic beauty of the many noble specimens of eloquence it contains, it will possess, for a considerable section of our reading public, all the interest of literary news. The biographical notices of the various writers, some of them not so well known in this country as they deserve to be, give many curious illustrations of American society and manners, and the summaries of their literary labors contain much well conceived and finely expressed criticism. It is true that the editor's eulogies are often too large and indiscriminate, but this is very excusable in a book of which a principal object is to assert and vindicate the literary claims of his countrymen.

and moralists like Dwight and Channing; jurists such as Marshall, Kent, and Story; political essayists like Hamilton and Everett; novelists like Brown and Cooper (Washington Irving is a universal genius;) historians like Bancroft, Prescott, and Sparkes, are names which in their mere mention carry their own ovation; and if America has yet given the world no great poet, the cause must be sought neither in the nature of her population nor the circumstances of her society. They are made of the same stuff as the people from whom Shakspeare sprung, and the elements of poetry are rife in their glorious scenery, and the striking incidents of broil and battle, of adventure and romance, which abound in the history of the settlement of their country, the Indian wars, and the revolutionary struggle. Nor, whilst felling their primeval forests, and subduing the untilled earth to the uses of man, have the muse's notes been silent amongst them. In our own day Halleck, Bryant, and Longfellow are men who belong to a high, perhaps the highest order of lyrical genius. But why ask of the dawn the effulgent glories of He must be a bold man who, with such a vol- noon-day, or the softer radiance of eventide? They ume as this before him, would decry the Ameri- have yet chosen rather to worship reverently at the cans as indifferent to literature, as unambitious of shrine of the great bards who have gone before, its distinctions, or incapable of its achievements. in the land from which their fathers came, than to Such sneers as these have indeed been hazarded; essay new ways of poetizing. In these they take but they have proceeded only from a few travelling pride, for they are to them, as to us, an imperishbook-makers, incapable of observing truly or infer-able heritage. And now that the sources of disring rightly, and from critics whose only inspiration | cord between Britain and America have been dried was to be found in their presumptuous malice and up, we look to such recollections as these to tighten crapulent ignorance. Sometimes we have been told that the Americans could not produce good writers because they produced good politicians and good citizens; that they could not be literary because they were democratic. As if the history of the whole world did not tell us that republics have always been as fertile in great authors as in great statesmen and commanders, and that the home of liberty is ever the home of arts and letters. It is true that the democracy of the United States is a different thing from the democracies of Athens or Florence, but it differs only in being a more perfect exemplification of its type, and a more logical development of the principles on which these were constructed. Again, it is said that the Americans cannot be literary because they are practical; just as if the greatest English authors, from Chaucer, Spencer, Shakspeare, and Milton, down to Sir Walter Scott and our own contemporaries, had not been men eminently practical in the scope and objects of their lives. Mr. Griswold has taken

the bonds of unity, and to restore that intimacy of feeling which should exist between the two great branches of the British race. The year which has passed brought with it noble and affecting proofs of the warmth of fraternal interest in our destinies which still exists beyond the Atlantic; and the tongue we speak in common should be for those families of mankind the pledge of a concord and harmony which, we deeply trust, will endure forever, unbroken by anything more serious than a brother's bickering. If ever again the horizon should be darkened by the prospect of a fratricidal war, the language in which we should be inclined to address America would be that in which the advent of civil strife was deprecated by one of the chief lights of our elder poesy:

"Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be;

Come

Come sink us rather in the sea; rather pestilence and reap us down; Come God's sword rather than our own.

Let rather Roman come again,

Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane.
In all the bonds we ever bore,
We grieved, we sighed, we wept; we never blushed
before."

The Americans may take pride in their historical laurels, for in no department of literary exertion has their success been more signal. We cannot forget that the distinguished man who now represents the United States in this country has also preeminent claims to be regarded as the representative of American letters. Mr. Bancroft's historical style is marked by a severe simplicity and grandeur which might be imitated with advantage by some of our writers, as will be perceived from the following fine passage, descriptive of the youth of Washington :

had placed the rights and the destinies of countless millons in the keeping of the widow's son."

THE MORMON COLONY.

cannot be made to produce anything.

THE St. Louis Republican of the 1st, contains some information concerning the progress of the Mormon colony which is to be located at the "Great Salt Lake City" in California, derived from a Mr. Little who has just arrived from that place, which he left in August. The Republican says:We learn from him that the country selected for the habitation of the Mormons is about twenty miles east from the Great Salt Lake. In company with others, he explored the valley, and he represents that they found a range of some eighty miles in length, and perhaps ten to twenty miles in width. The preparations for the reception of the advancing "After long years of strife, of repose, and of company of Mormons, were not, we should infer, very extensive. A field of about one hundred acres strife renewed, England and France solemnly of ground had been planted with corn, potatoes, agreed to be at peace. The treaties of Aix la turnips, and other edibles, but as the rain seldom Chapelle had been negotiated by the ablest states- fell there, they had to resort to the uncertain and men of Europe, in the splendid forms of monarchi- laborious process of irrigation. They had engaged cal diplomacy. They believed themselves the in the erection of a stockade, to protect the colony arbiters of mankind, the pacificators of the world from the attacks of the Indians, covering some ten acres of ground, within which from a hundred and -reconstructing the colonial system on a basis sixty to two hundred dwellings were to be erected. which should endure for ages confirming the Some parts of the valley have a very fertile appearpeace of Europe by the nice adjustment of mate-ance, but others, again, are exceedingly poor, and rial forces. At the very time of the congress of Aix la Chapelle, the woods of Virginia sheltered the youthful George Washington, the son of a widow. Born by the side of the Potomac, beneath the roof of a Westmoreland farmer, almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shades, no college crowned him with its honors: to read, to write, to cipher these had been his degrees in knowledge. And, now at sixteen years of age, in quest of an honest maintenance, encountering intolerable toil; cheered onward by being able to write to a schoolboy friend, Dear Richard, a doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;' himself his own cook, having no spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip;' roaming over spurs of the Alleghanies, and along the banks of the Shenandoah; alive to nature, and sometimes spending the best of the day in admiring the trees and richness of the land; among skin-clad savages, with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants, that would never speak English; rarely sleeping in a bed; holding a bearskin a splendid couch; glad of a resting-place for the night upon a little hay, straw, or fodder, and often camping in the forests, where the place nearest the fire was a happy luxury-this stripling surveyor in the woods, with no companion but his unlettered associates, and no implements of science" but his compass and chain, contrasted strangely with the imperial magnificence of the Congress of Aix la Chapelle. And yet God had selected, not Kaunitz, nor Newcastle, not a monarch of the house of Hapsburg, nor of Hanover, but the Virginia stripling, to give an impulse to human affairs, and, as far as events can depend on an individual,

6

little

On his return route, Mr. Little, who holds, we believe, some high office in the Mormon church, met the Mormon emigrants in detached parties. He though with some sanguine hopes, they were still does not speak very flatteringly of their condition, moving on to their destination. Many of the heads of the families were, it will be remembered, taken to fill up the California battalion and are still in California, and the women and children were left to get along as they best could. In many cases, boys were found driving the teams, barefoot, and the advanced parties were reduced to some extremity for the want of food. Two hundred of the oxen used in their teams had died after leaving Independence Rock, from eating some poisonous substance and exhaustion, and they were compelled to get along by using cows in their stead. All were, it is feared, stinted for provisions, and even after their hunters, there is room to apprehend suffering their arrival, unless game could be procured by from starvation-Mr. Little representing, at the same time, that in and around the Salt Lake valley, very little game was to be found. On the whole, we are fearful that most distressing accounts will be received from this people, by the first arrivals next spring.

ficulties which the California battalion had to en The following order, illustrating some of the dif counter, has been placed at our disposal :—

"HEADQUARTERS MORMON BATTALION, Mission of San Diego, 30th January, 1847. ORDER No. 1.

"The licut. colonel commanding, congratulates the battalion on their safe arrival on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and the conclusion of its march of over two thousand miles. History may be searched of it has been through a wilderness, where nothing in vain for an equal march of infantry; nine tenths but savages and wild beasts are found; or deserts where, for want of water, there is no living crea

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