the immediate consequences of the attack on Sum- | ter; and the historian, as he passes in review the men who have thus far been prominent in the war, must himself wonder which of the names he mentions are to be written by him before his work is done as the most illustrious and beloved of his fellow-citizens. For it is the peculiarity of our war that no man has been conspicuous from the beginning as its controlling power, as Washington was in the Revolution, or Napoleon after Toulon. We have hailed every new man raised to eminent position with hope and enthusiasm; but we are two years gone in the war, and no great dominating mind has assumed the mastery of events.

The pitiful efforts to create factitious greatness and popularity will be among the most striking facts which the annalist of the times will have to record. The attempt of partisans of whatever kind to appropriate to any party idol the fame and popular confidence, which can come in the heart of the people only as love comes to the lover, will leave such idols deserted and contemned. In this country we have had but very few men of vast popularity. Washington and Jackson and Clay were the chief among them. But it was the magnetic power of these men themselves that carried others with them. It was not the determination of others that foisted them upon the country as popular.

Another point which will be full of interest to the annalist will be the slowly ripening consciousness of the people that they had really entered upon a long, resolute, and radical war. Perhaps no nation ever found itself involved in a struggle so enormous and momentous, which had marched up to the very battle-field, as it were, without any serious apprehension that it would have to fight; and when it fell back dismayed and defeated from the first shock of arms, the old habit, the long tradition of peace were so strong, that still it supposed the affair a riot when in fact it was a revolution.

A European officer, familiar with men, and politics, and wars, wrote to the Easy Chair after that first bitter surprise of defeat: "Mon ami, you will be broken-hearted. Don't be so foolish. You have no army, no navy, no military spirit, no traditions of war in this generation: above all, you don't believe that it is a war. You have got to learn that first of all. Then you will have to organize your forces, and drill them, and bring the country into acquiescence with and adaptation to the war. While you are doing this you will be defeated, discouraged, mortified, angry, amazed. But have no fear. It is in your people. You will tumble round like a drunken man, or a landlubber at sea, for two years. Then you will find your legs. You will know how to fight and how to endure the chances of war, and you will quietly push on, up and down, to victory." This is the substance of what a cool, clear, foreign observer, long resident among us, said. It will be not the least interesting task of the historian to indicate the general justice of such a view, as vindicated by the facts. For it was almost two years exactly before we made war sufficiently earnest to pierce the lines of the enemy and expose his interior condition.

The issues of Harper's History thus far show that its scope in the detail of events and estimate of character is to be comprehensive and thorough. To the family circle its vivid and striking illustrations especially commend it, because the impressions which children gain from pictures of famous men and deeds are ineffaceable.

THE town, as "town," has been singularly uneventful during the month. The two excitements have been the return of soldiers and the intense and prolonged interest in the Southwestern battles. The opera dwindled after Medori went. There were no striking new plays or actors at the theatres. The anniversary meetings were peculiarly uninteresting, and never made so slight a ripple upon the stream of public attention. There was a large audience to hear Mr. Wendell Phillips at the Cooper Institute; for it is no longer felt to be a crime, or even dangerous, to hear the most polished and elegant of American orators declare that injustice is unjust. There was also a melancholy gathering by night in Union Square to hear Mr. Isaiah Rynders complain that he was no longer permitted to mob Mr. Phillips. The club-house of the new social club known as the Union League Club, which is entirely distinct from the leagues that held public meetings during the previous month, was opened by a festal assembly of the members and their friends, with short addresses from the President, Mr. Minturn, Mr. Bancroft, and Dr. Bellows. The house is spacious and convenient, and was brilliant and beautiful with flowers. There was no supper; for it is a club founded in another feeling than that of mere enjoyment.

Club life was not natural to New York; but the present generation takes kindly to it. The old Union Club was founded by gentlemen of leisure, who had been in Europe, and who had seen that a club, like a carriage, was a part of the decoration of leisure social life. For many years it has been a place where some gentlemen dine, and a few read the newspapers, and elderly persons play whist; a club which opened its doors to no strangers but members of the diplomatic body, and which was reluctant to shut them upon Judah Benjamin. The hesitation to shut the doors opened a good many eyes.

The New York Club is an association of younger fashionable men. It occupies, like the Union Club, a house upon the Fifth Avenue, spacious and elegant, which was formerly one of the finest private mansions in the city. Its tone is that of "Young New York." The Athenæum is a club upon the same general plan as the Century, a club which grew out of the old Sketch Club. The Athenæum is less exclusively a social club, simply, than the Union or the New York. It has essays read sometimes. It has exhibitions of pictures. It aims at a positive literary and æsthetic influence. The Century, which occupies a most convenient house on Sixteenth Street, near Union Square, has been for many years the favorite club of artists, authors, and persons especially interested in kindred pursuits. Gulian C. Verplanck is its President, and its Wednesday and Saturday evenings are immortalized in many a memory by their genial assemblies. How regretfully now the Easy Chair recalls the sparkling feasts, when, amidst wit, and story, and music, an exile of Erin sang with infinite tenderness of pathos Father Prout's "Bells of Shandon"-an exile whose voice, in its later defense of injustice and crime, rings no more with the old music, but

"Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh."

To these clubs, and to others of less general note, has now been added the Loyal League Club, which occupies the noble house of the late Henry Parrish on Union Square. The site is fortunate, for Union Square was the scene of the first great response of the people to the challenge of war, and of the anniversary meetings of Sumter. These associations and its name identify it with the cause and the

Editor's Drawer.

HE Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton,

Tthe ancestor of all the Stoddards- and a troop they are of worthy sons of a worthy sire-had a black boy in his employ, who was, like the most of black boys, full of fun and mischief, and up to a joke, no matter at whose expense. He went with the parson's horse every morning to drive the cows to pasture. It was on a piece of table-land some little distance from the village; and here, out of sight, the neighbors' boys were wont to meet him and " race horses" every Sunday morning. Parson Stoddard heard of it, and resolved to catch them at it and put an end to the sport. Next Sunday morning he told Bill he would ride the mare to pasture

with the cows, and he (Bill) might stay at home. Bill knew what was in the wind, and taking a short cut across lots, was up into the pasture away ahead of the parson. The boys were there with their horses, only waiting for Bill and his master's mare. He told the boys to be ready, and as soon as the old gentleman arrived to give the word, "Go!" Bill hid himself at the other end of the field, where the race always ended. The parson came jogging along up, and the boys sat demurely on their steeds, as if waiting for "service to begin." But as the good old mare rode into line they cried "Go!" and away went the mare with the reverend rider sticking fast, like John Gilpin, but there was no stop to her or to him. Away, head of all the rest, he went like the wind; and at the end of the field Bill jumped up from under the fence, and sung out, "I knowed you'd beat, Massa! I knowed you'd beat!"

EVERY Sunday evening the old gentleman was accustomed to examine his household on the sermon of the day, and he required each one to tell him something that had been said in the course of it. One of his habits was to close his discourse with these words: "Thus much may suffice." His old manuscripts, now in possession of the descendants of the family, show this as the frequent close of his sermons. 'Bill's habit of attention was very poor, and his memory worse; indeed he had a "bad memory and a first-rate forgettery." He could recall nothing of what he had heard; and his master at length, by way of quickening his "intellex," promised to give him a sound whipping if he did not remember something of the discourse on the next Sabbath-day. The boy went to church as usual, and went to sleep as usual, and woke up in time to come home with the rest, to be examined on the sermon of which he had not heard a word.

"Well, Bill, what was the text?"

'Dunno, Massa; dunno."

"Thus much may suffice,'" said Bill; and the discomfited parson put off the flogging.

A CORRESPONDENT of the Drawer states that the

following epitaph is still to be seen on a tombstone

in Solyhull church-yard, England. We have seen it in an English literary periodical. The Rev. Dr. Greenwood records these lines on the death of his wife:

"Go, cruel death, thou hast cut down

The fairest Greenwood in all this kingdom!
Her virtues and her good qualities were such
That surely she deserved a lord or judge:
But her piety and great humility
Made her prefer me, a Doctor in Divinity;
Which heroic action, joined to all the rest,
Made her to be esteem'd the Phoenix of her sex;
And like that bird a young she did create,
To comfort those her loss had made disconsolate.
My grief for her was so sore,

That I can only utter two lines more.
For this and all other good women's sake,
Never put blisters on a dying woman's back."

SPEAKING of epitaphs, it has often been noticed that in England humor runs in a sombre sort of vein admirably adapted to church-yard literature, while in this country we think grave jokes very sorry ones. Think of a reverend British curate perpetrating the following, and actually placing it on the tombstone of the clerk of his parish:

"To the memory of Peter Izod, who was thirty-five years clerk of this parish, and always proved himself a pious and mirthful man.

"The life of this clerk was just threescore and ten,
During half of which time he had sung out Amen.
He married when young. like other young men;
Eis wife died one day, so he chanted Amen.
A second he took; she departed-what then?
He married and buried a third with Amen.
Thus his joys and his sorrows were treble, but then
His voice was deep bass, as he chanted Amen.
On the horn he could blow as well as most men,
But his horn was exalted in blowing Amen.
He lost all his mind after threescore and ten;
And here with three wives he waits till again
The trumpet shall rouse him to sing out Amen."

BREVITY is the soul of wit, and here are several brevities:

Southey used to say that "the moment any thing assumed the shape of a duty, Coleridge felt himself incapable of doing it."

Heterodoxy is said to be any doxy but our own; just as nonsense is sense that differs from ours. A grammatical Adam is a relative without an antecedent.

Quills are things that are sometimes taken from the pinions of one goose to spread the opinions of

"Dunno, Massa; dunno."

"My brethren," said Swift, in a sermon, "there are three sorts of pride-of birth, of riches, and of

you being liable to that abominable vice."

LITTLE FREDDY H, a four-year-old, son of Chaplain H, of the -th Regiment New York Volunteers, "perpetrated" a good thing while at camp at Suffolk, a short time since. A smart-looking Lieutenant, with dashing air and perfumed breath, came into a tent where Freddy was. The little soldier scanned him very closely, and when a convenient opportunity offered itself he said to the Lieutenant, "You are a doctor; I know you are a

My brother has a little boy who was born on the day Buchanan was elected President. Whether that is evidence that he will one day fill the Presidential chair your clairvoyant readers must decide. One thing is sure, he is very smart. A short time since he told a story, and upon being asked by his mother if he did not know it was wrong, replied yes. His mother then told him God did not love little boys who told stories, and asked if he was not aware that God knew he had told a story?

"Know it?" said he; "of course he does. He know every thing. He knew it before I told it. Yes, mamma, he knew it before I was born; and I don't believe he cares one bit more about it now than he did before."

What could a mother say to such a theologian?

MIXING up figures is common in the pulpit as in the stump speeches of candidates for Congress. A violent preacher, in one of his excited harangues, delivered himself of a number of metaphors so heterogeneously confused that one of his hearers thus versifies the scene and the sermon:

Staying his hand, which, like a hammer,
Had thump'd and bump'd his anvil-book,
And waving it to still the clamor,

The tub-man took a loftier look,
And thus, condensing all his powers,
Scattered his oratoric flowers:
"What! will ye still, ye heathen, flee
From sanctity and grace,
Until your blind idolatry

Shall stare ye in the face?

Will ye throw off the mask, and show
Thereby the cloven foot below?
Do-but remember, ye must pay
What's due to ye on settling day!
Justice's eye, it stands to sense,

Can never stomach such transgressions;
Nor can the hand of Providence

Wink at your impious expressions.
The infidel thinks vengeance dead,
And in his fancied safety chuckles;
But Atheism's hydra head

Shall have a rap upon the knuckles."

THEY have Dutch Squires out West, as well as up in Albany and Troy, where they do most abound. A correspondent of the Drawer writes:

In the State of Indiana for many years lived and reigned a worthy Dutch "Squire." He "knew all the law they was," but sometimes had a way of his own of doing things. On one occasion the Squire visited the city of Madison, in Jefferson County, and saw on the table of a city Justice some blank writs,

the first he had ever seen in his life, commencing in the usual way-"The State of Indiana to any constable of Jefferson County, greeting," etc. He secured some of them to take home for use in his own court, in the County of Brown. In explanation of the manner of using them he was told to strike out the word "Jefferson" before the word "County," and insert "Brown." Now his constable's name was Bob Thorne. The Squire carried home his blanks, and soon had occasion to use some of them. He remembered that something had been said to him about striking out one word and inserting another; but what that something was he couldn't just get at. Presently the forgotten explanation came back to him; and seizing his pen he struck out the word constable, and inserted Bob Thorne; so that his writs were issued reading thus: "The State of Indiana to any Bob Thorne of Jefferson County, greeting," etc.

PUNCH says that one of the chief duties of the Bishop of Gibraltar is to "confirm" the news of the Indian Mail. Would it not be well to have a whole bench of Bishops at our War News?

A REBEL prisoner, confined in one of our Western strong-holds provided for prisoners of war, writes to his old friend the Drawer, from whom he has been long and grievously separated. He says:

Twen

"PRISON, April 25, 1863. "Like a stray sunbeam, your Magazine for May has just come into our prison, brought in by one of the Yankee officers, from whom we stole it. [It is wrong to steal, but the temptation was great; poor fellows! they had not seen the Drawer for two years, and they must have it.] In fact, we made a successful reconnoissance in force, and took it. ty-two months since I have read or seen a Harper. It came like an old friend, and is most welcome. Harper was one of the many ties that bound the Union together; and it is one of the few ties, I am willing to acknowledge, that bind me to the associations of old. When peace returns with healing in its wings my first order to New York will be for all the back Numbers!

"The Drawer, that blessed institution, would bring sunshine out of a thunder-cloud. And oh! how many budgets of fun have been lost forever to us rebels, because we have had no Drawer to put them in. For we have many humors in our camps and field: grim war often has a sunny smile on his scarred face, and the gay soldier boy is fond of a joke even on the battle-ground. Will you lend me your Drawer-I used to call it ours-to keep a few pleasantries of rebel life.

"General Bragg was always a tyrant; no rebel or Yankee will deny it who has had the misfortune to be in his power. We would have gladly traded him at any time, and given you boot, for the pettiest officer in your service. In fact he was utterly detested by rank and file. One of the men in the Crescent Regiment, Company A, had a dog at Corinth, and his name was 'General Bragg.' The dog did not know it, or he would never have submitted to the disgrace of such a name. Perhaps it was the name, perhaps not, but something killed him, and all around the story ran from one to another that 'General Bragg is dead,' and the men were in great spirits, all believing, at least hoping, that the news was true. When we found that we had been sold, and that it was our beloved dog and not our General, we buried him with the honors of war, and now would like to bury the General with the honor of a