white. The job was a great national one, and let none be | been sold for $2800, we must understand that the banned who bore an honorable part in it. "Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will soon come, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth keeping in all future time. And then there will be some black men who can remember that they helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear that there will be some white men unable to forget that they have striven to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God in his own good time will give us the rightful result." The draft, which was suspended in New York and vicinity in consequence of the riots of July, was resumed, in spite of the opposition of Governor Seymour, on the 19th of August, and was completed during the ensuing ten days. Ample preparations had been made to put down any resistance, and none was attempted. In New York an ordinance was passed by the Common Council making an appropriation of $3,000,000 to pay the commutation of all drafted persons. This was vetoed by the Mayor, but after the expiration of the ten days required by law was passed over his veto. In the mean time another ordinance, appropriating $2,000,000 to provide substitutes for or pay the commutation of members of the fire department, of the police, and members of militia regiments who might be drafted, was passed and signed by the Mayor. The money required by this ordinance has been mostly raised by way of loan from banks, insurance companies, and private individuals. The other ordinance will probably be practically null on account of the want of funds to meet its provisions.-Nearly 2000 claims, amounting in all to more than a million and a half of dollars, have been presented for damages sustained during the riots of July. actual sum received for them is about $240. Two years ago the same slaves would have easily sold for $1600 to $2000, in gold or its equivalent. There is a report, for which there appears at present no adequate authority, that the Confederate Government has resolved to call for a half million of negro troops, to whom will be guaranteed their freedom and a bounty of fifty acres of land to each at the close of the war.-We note this report, in order that it may be on record, to be substantiated or contradicted in the course of events. EUROPE. It is announced, upon apparently good grounds, though not officially, that the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, the brother of the Emperor, has accepted the offer made to him of the Imperial crown of Mexico upon condition that the new Empire is nominally placed under the protection of the European Powers, in common, though virtually under that of France. Whether the vote of the "Council of Notables" convened in the capital shall be considered as a formal election of the Archduke, or whether this must be further confirmed by other authority, appears to be undecided. However, in the present posture of affairs, this is of no consequence. Any further confirmation required will be easily secured. sels. One is the destruction of our blockading fleet; the other a sudden attack upon some of our great seaports, most probably that of New York. There can be no doubt that at least three ironclad steamers are now ready, or nearly ready, for sea in British ports, designed for the Confederate service. At the middle of August one is said, upon good authority, to have been in the graving-dock at Liverpool, plated, and with all her machinery on board; another had been launched at Birkenhead; Elections for State officers have been held in and a third at Glasgow. All of them were to be several States. In Kentucky Mr. Bramlette, the ready for sea early in September. In the mean "Union candidate," received a majority of more time the Confederate cruiser Florida had made her than 50,000, out of a vote of some 85,000, over his appearance off the coast of Ireland, and her visit was opponent, Mr. Wickliffe. The exact figures, as of- supposed to have some connection with the fitting ficially given, are-Bramlette, 68,009; Wickliffe, out of these vessels. Two objects have been sug17,384; majority, 50,625. Governor Bramlette, ingested as the immediate work of these powerful veshis inaugural, clearly defined his position. He affirms that the revolted States did not change their status by rebelling; that all that they now need to do is to return to their fealty and take their position as States. When the rebellion closes we shall have the same Constitution as before. What Kentucky asks is not a reconstructed Union, but one restored upon a constitutional basis. He objects to the arming of negro regiments; and inquires what is to be done with such soldiers at the close of the war. He affirms that the recent result of the election shows that Kentucky will not fraternize with the rebellion, but is and will be loyal to the Government established by our fathers.—In Vermont the election for State officers was, as every one was assured, wholly in favor of the Union candidates. Beyond half a score or so of Representatives the Opposition have nothing.. -From California we have merely telegraphic dispatches, the purport of which is that the Union men have carried every thing, and that their opponents, under whatever name, have been thoroughly defeated. The Polish question presents no new aspects. It is not now thought that any general European war will grow out of it during the present season. The British papers profess to learn that a treaty, offensive and defensive, between Russia and the United States has been agreed upon, and speculate upon the probable consequences to British commerce in case of war. There is a strong probability that hostilities have actually broken out between Japan and the various Treaty Powers. The party in the Japanese Court opposed to intercourse with foreigners appears to have gained the entire ascendency. Various members of the foreign missions have been assassinated, and other outrages committed. For these reparation has been demanded, to the amount of about $450,000. This was paid, but the perpetrators could not be given up. The Government declared the ports closed, and ordered all foreigners to leave in 30 days. Our latest intelligence comes down to the close of June. At that date there were thirteen English war vessels, two French, and one American, the Wyoming, in Bay of Yeddo. Then the En The issue of the war turns in a great measure upon the question of finance. Taking an average of the market for a month, we may say that gold bears a premium of 25 per cent. in the loyal States: that is, for $125 in currency one can get $100 inglish and French commanders had given notice of gold, or its equivalent in exchange. In the Confederacy $100 in current funds is worth about $8 in gold, or its equivalent in exchange. Hence, when we read in the Southern papers that slaves have their intention to seize Kanagawa, the port of Yeddo, in case their demands were not complied with; and it was said the Wyoming would co-operate so far as to defend the rights and property of Americans. THE HE Easy Chair receives a great deal of com- | his poetry-amen! When he was ready, some ten plaint, both written and spoken, of the inequal years afterward, Tennyson published a new volume, ity of public or editorial favor. Has genius perish- and took his place among the English poets. ed from among men? asks the chorus. Shakespeare The chorus ought to remember that if you carry a and Milton were undoubtedly great poets, but is po- wax taper into a high wind it will unquestionably etry a lost art? Can there be any greater folly be blown out. But if you hold a blazing pine-knot than the strain of remark in which publishers and in your hand, the wildest gale makes it only more critics indulge about poets and poetry? Then what splendid. In this age of the world, whatever pubselections they make! They insist that poetry is a lishers and magazines may think and do, poetry, if drug, and we invite your attention to the poetry it be truly such, can not be snuffed out of knowlthey publish! It would seem that they are re-edge. The public ear is ready for the ring of the solved to do all they can to make it a drug; and, if what they print is a specimen of what is produced, they are quite right, and the divine afflatus has blown over forever. But meanwhile, to show you how little they know of what poetry really is written, we have here a few cantos which, without false modesty, etc., etc., may be considered quite equal to the stuff that is constantly published on all sides. And would you believe that the magazines which are filled with dreary rhymes, and which sigh over the fatal decline of poetry, have had the refusal of these very cantos, and returned the insufferable answer that the editor declined to express any opinion upon the merits of the manuscripts with which he had been kindly favored, but found them unsuitable for his purpose! Unsuitable! Of course they were; for his purpose is trash, humbug, vulgarity, and the demoralization of the public taste. He doesn't know poetry when he sees it. It is a burning shame, shouts the chorus, that the old story of genius neglected should be forever repeated, and we demand a place for our poetry in the literature of the age. true metal among all the noises of the base coin. Thus in the days when Martin Farquhar Tupper was soberly thought by some gentle souls to be a poet, the Easy Chair, which then sat at the table of a daily paper, found in an English weekly, The Leader, a copy of verses, "In summer, when the days are long," which he cut out and republished. They flew all over the country, and finally alighted in all the best collections. The verses were anonymous, and, so far as the Easy Chair knows, they have always remained so. They were copied and preserved because they seemed to most readers to be poetry. If any one of the chorus, having written a poem, will send it to a newspaper, he may be sure that it will have a fair start if it seems to the editor to be worth the space. There is a great deal of verse which was published in magazines at the time of the appearance of "In summer, when the days are long," which has escaped and will forever escape the collections, just as there was published in gorgeously bound books the Proverbial Philosophy of Tupper, which will utterly escape all remembrance except that of curiosity and amusement. But the complaining chorus is not peculiar to this country. The extremely entertaining Paris correspondent of Childs's American Publishers' Circular What can be done with such a fiery chorus as this? There is but one answer for it, and that they disregard. We have only to ask any one of the chorus to look at the famous poets of the time, and ask whether they demanded a place for their poet-mentions that a certain Monsieur Theodore de Banry. Or did they write poetry which took a place? In England the most popular and admired of the native poets is Tennyson. Well, thirty years ago Tennyson published a slight volume of verses, and John Bull pished disdainfully. He despised it as a hungry ox might despise whipped syllabub. It was a medley of weak affectations. It was worse, he insisted, than Wordsworth's daffy-down-dilly. It was the very sublime of namby-pamby. Blackwood, especially, which was then as savage as it is now alternately sour and silly, made infinite sport of the new poetry. Blackwood was the mouth-piece of second-rate men, who had made and could make no permanent reputation. It was a monthly mess spiced hot for the clubs. It aimed at a sensation. Blackwood is a magazine of which Delta has been the characteristic poet, Wilson the wit, Lockhart the critic, and Alison the political philosopher, worthily assisted recently in the department of American affairs by a Captain Handy or Hamly, who wrote Lady Lee's Widowhood." Blackwood sneered at the new poet, who rhymed disdainfully in reply: "You did late review my lays, You did mingle blame and praise, I forgave you all the blame; I could not forgive the praise, The magazine could neither make him nor unmake ville has been loudly lamenting that poets can not get the ear of the public. And he laments in so diverting a manner that, if his verse is as lively as his prose, the public is a great loser by the obduracy of the publishers. But Monsieur de Banville, who writes what an ingenious correspondent justly thinks worth translating into another language, complains that his verse is not thought worth reading by the French public. It is as if a successful tailor should complain that people did not like his sponge-cake, or as if the confectioners were to blame for not buying it to offer to their customers. Why should not publishers be supposed to know their business as well as other merchants? If they let slip a MS. which would have coined money for them, they are like traders who miss a promising speculation in any other commodity. The drolly-doleful De Banville mentions a manager in Paris who wanted no masterpieces at his theatre, "because," he said, "if I give a master-piece to-day, I should be asked for a master-piece to-morrow. If I have none to give the public will think I have nothing to give. I must furnish a product which I can always find in the market." What does all this show? Simply that the manager was a shrewd merchant. And why should M. de Banville try a manager by a standard which he would not apply to other traders? The manager must earn his living as well as the poet De Banville. If the poet De Banville is unwilling to give away his poems, why should he complain of a manager who is unwilling to buy what he can not readily sell again? Young Gunnybags indulges his cynical exaggeration, but it is a curious fact that, with the exception of a few great hotels and some smaller hostelries, and the farm-houses among hills which are neat and nothing more, the proprietors of sea-side and other resorts have not yet learned the value of an investment of cleanliness. If a man have a house in the most charming and advantageous situation, though it were directly upon the sea-beach with the broad ocean view, and yet has not learned to make the appearance of his house as attractive as its position, he has not one of the best qualities of a landlord. If the fences are half down, and the grass overgrown, and the gravel ragged, and pieces of paper and chips are lying about, and the paint is rubbed off, and weeds sprout about the foundations, the landlord is throwing hundreds of dollars into the sea every year. If there is a decline in the interest of the world in | she is wonderful. And for all this accumulated dispoetry, or if the race of great poets is any more ex- comfort, dirt, suffocation, flies, horrid food, scant tinct now than it always was, it is a fact which fairly towels, intolerable every thing, you pay every month challenges the most curious inquiry and investiga- the revenue of a German Duke. tion. But it is no more matter of querulous complaint than the disappearance of the Mastodon or the Ichthyosaurus. Why should we not all begin with modesty? If people won't read what we write, let us beg pardon and believe that it is not worth reading. Why is not that quite as likely as any thing else? If you who read this were an Easy Chair, and had the run of the editor's room, you would be confounded by the mass of manuscript dull indigestaque which is hurled upon him. When he politely declines the epic poems, and the novels in verse, and the new systems of philosophy which arrive every week, suppose that all the De Banvilles should open their batteries of disdainful satire upon him! De Banville is a humorist, not a poet. If he had sent his airy sarcasms, instead of his serious verse, to the magazines and publishers, he would certainly never have felt inclined to make sport of the purveyors of literature. We have more than once expressed our incredulity of the "mute, inglorious Miltons." Men of the Miltonic power of appreciation are known in every private circle, although their fame may not go far beyond. But men of the Miltonic creative genius are not mute. Singing is a part of their inspiration. They seek an audience as naturally as the flower seeks the light; and if they are born in some quiet village, they either pipe so sweetly that the world attends, or they fly to the public which they do not find around them. The secret of popularity and public success defies analysis, but literary men have certainly as fair a chance as any other class. A friend of the Easy Chair went to the sea-side this summer and paid the fabulous prices. When he came away the host hoped that he was satisfied; and as the host was really an amiable man, the guest asked him into his room and said to him: "My dear Sir, your intentions are excellent, but they miscarry. This room, for instance, needs nothing but new plastering, new painting, new papering, new carpeting, and new furnishing, to be a comfortable room." He probably spoke the truth of a great many houses, the proprietors of which simply do not understand what cleanliness is. There is but one nation of which the representative is a truly clean man, and that is the English. There are plenty of unclean Englishmen, but John Bull is neat in his person and in his surroundings, in his country inns and his foreign home; and neither M. Crapeau nor Jonathan Esq. are so. The If the Easy Chair may be permitted to allude to his old friend, Solomon Gunnybags, he would say that the venerable gentleman reports a crowd at ev-national dress-coat and black satin waistcoat have ery watering-place during the summer, and the young man, his son, has his cynical comment upon the fact. It is marvelous, he says, how we distress ourselves for pleasure! Away we go out of the pleasantest home to some sea-side or mountain retreat. The trains, the boats, the stages swarm with people. They pant, and swelter, and swear. The poor little children, defrauded of their nursery and quiet city parks, or country pastures and gardens, fret and cry. We reach some remote, inconvenient, disagreeable house. The host, with a screw in his eye and an augur in his voice, says that nothing but the corner of the kitchen is left. "Charming-just the thing --and grandma, where is she to sleep?" There's a ladder in the hen-house. "Capital! she'll roost there perfectly. Won't you, dear grandma? In the country we don't look for city luxuries, do we?" The next week comes along a King or Sultan, or the Queen of Sheba herself, and wants rooms. No; nothing. All full. Barns crowded, and guests colonized under the fence. And then how grandma chuckles from her roost in the hen-house to see the unfortunates plunging about for a perch! Ah, well! Let those laugh that win. The superb Sheba presently comes upon a room. Eureka! It is ten feet square with one small window opening plump into an apple-tree. If the nose be a judge there has never been any fresh air in the room. er. If the eyes are faithful, the carpet and the walls have been cleanThe bed-well! the human being in his summer performances for pleasure is wonderful; he or been sometimes observed to cover a soiled shirt; and as for la belle France, one of the wittiest caricatures in Punch represented two hirsute Frenchmen pausing with an air of utter bewilderment in the Great Exhibition before a wash-stand, and asking, What is that machine for? It was doubly characteristic of John Bull: first, in its brutal disregard of the rites of international hospitality, for he was then the host of all the world; and, secondly, in its profound scorn of a people who were not adepts in the washstand. We may also compare, for our instruction, the average English country inn with the American steamer. Great Heavens! what a price the innocent passenger pays in going from New York to Boston by the Sound boats, to see people wipe their boots upon damask sofas, and to behold a small flame that gives no light in a gorgeous glass chandelier. Is there no beauty in fitness? If a sensible New York or Boston man of business refrains from furnishing his quiet parlor like a Queen's boudoir, why should a multitude of them, as directors of a steamboat company, furnish a public room, which is always to be thronged by the most promiscuous company, as if it were a state drawing-room? The only reasonable answer is that they mean to ask a high price, and therefore wish to persuade their cus tomers that they are getting their money's worth. If young Gunnybags will only call the proprietors of summer-houses into his room and quietly suggest to them to have every thing neat and nothing gaudy, they will discover to their surprise that, in the esti mation of that excellent judge, although they may be most worthy men they do not yet know how to keep a hotel. spoke, and there was an indescribable resignation in his whole aspect. Afterward I saw one of the Indian women seated upon a rock between the beach and the road, steadfastly watching the gay procession of equipages that flashed by in the afternoon sun. Whatever her thoughts were her silent figure was as touching and tragical as a Sybil. By the side of the sea she sat the lone mother of dead empires as much as Rome; sylvan empires that have disappeared more wholly than the glories of the seven hills. Massasoit was king of all the wide shores upon which she sat, and the pale faces were doubting intruders. Now Massasoit in yonder tent mourns that spiced food kills his children, and glad In the course of his summer wanderings the Easy Chair came upon an Indian encampment by moonlight upon the sea-shore. There were but a dozen tents pitched upon the grass between the road and the beach, and all the tents were different in form. The Indians were Penobscots from Old Town, in Maine, and they sat during the day weaving baskets or making bows and arrows and little canoes, and in the evening they sat around the tents or were closely shut up within them. On this evening the moon was in the first quarter and shed a watery lightly sells musk-rats for tirty-fi' cents apiece. upon the camp, which, at a little distance, was weird with the faint illumination of the canvas from the dips inside. As the Easy Chair came still nearer he heard the music of a hand-organ grinding a polka, and saw a group sitting and standing under a tree silently looking upon two or three couples who were dancing the polka upon the grass, while two or three small children rolled and turned head over heels upon the ground as lightly and smoothly as balls of wool. The music changed to a slow and melancholy waltz, and the mysterious couples wheeled duskily about, the moonlight glistening upon the sea and the surf languidly plunging behind them. There was no chattering, there was no sound at all, in fact, but the melancholy organ and the sea. The figures moved solemnly, as if it were a dance of destiny. Perhaps they are dancing still. One of the older men, with whom I afterward talked, told me that there were about eight hundred of them in Old Town, some sixty miles from the mouth of the Penobscot. They talk English imperfectly, but speak chiefly old Penobscot mingled with English words. We are mostly farmers, he said, and some are rich with money mostly in cash. "Every body love dat," he said quietly and languidly, as he counted me out some bills in change. "Dat's good," he added, as he handed the greenbacks to his wife-squaw, I should say " Dat passes every where all tru' the North; 'cep in de woods. Dat no good dare." The Indians live paceably with their white neighbors, he said; and in the winter, when field-work is over, many of them make the baskets and pretty wares which they bring southward in the summer to sell. They encamp somewhere upon the shore of Massachusetts Bay, and stay until they have sold out, or until September comes and visitors go home. Long, long ago, the old man said, he had camped at Nahant, but since then, until this year, he had not been away from Old Town, except in the winter to catch muskrats and minks. "For musk-rats we get forty cents, tirty-eight, tirty-seven, sometime tirty-fi'. For mink fi' dollars." He took me to the side of his tent and showed the trunk of a small ash-tree. By beating the outside vigorously the pith is made more pliable, so that it can be more readily worked. It is not a long step from Massasoit to an original proprietor of the town of Northampton, in the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts; and the Puritan and the Indian have something in common. We fancy the King of Massachusetts Bay treating upon equal terms with the Governor of Plymouth, and there is a fierce grandeur in the character and history of King Philip, so far as they are known to us, which would become the hero of a Homeric tale or a Norse ballad. Yet the grimness and silent gloom which we associate with the aspect and the fate of Philip have their counterpart in the conduct of the Puritans who slew him and then exhibited his head; and if the attack upon Deerfield was fearful, not less so was the burning of the Pequot fort at Saybrook. Indeed the friend whose pleasant letter occasions this disquisition, and who inherits the feeling of the ancient Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam for the losel Yankees, speaks of the Puritan much as a loyalist gentleman of King Charles's court would have described an Independent. "I have the old Puritan before me. The character of the books he read fully impressed upon his countenance and bearing-a stern, uncompromising, uncharitable Christian, ready to hang, burn, or torture either a Quaker or Indian, and from his armory ready to take his place in the Church militant to defend with his life every dogma taught in his library." As we squatted upon each side of the clean handsome wood, and the old man talked on with a melodious drone which was monotonous but pleasant, and the summer sea plashed just at our side, I asked him if his people dwindled or increased. We are going, he said. Since we live in houses and our children eat spiced food they get sickly and die. We are going, he said, musingly, and the sea plashed between his words. There was a melancholy tranquillity in his manner and speech. When we were in front of his tent he leaned against the side as he Yet The Puritan was an uncharitable Christian, but his view of Christianity did not make it a gospel of peace and love, but a dispensation of terror. He was no more uncharitable on the one side than on the other, and would have burnt a Romish priest with the same solemn zest that he hung a Quaker. His hatred of conformity to the dogmas of others willingly exiled him from all the sweet associations of native land and familiar faces to the most savage and remote wilderness, and then his fervent hostility to those who would not conform to his own dogmas blinded him to the wrong of banishing them. the obvious excuse long urged for the Puritans is still valid. They had left a society whose tenets they did not like, and they wanted others who did not like their tenets to leave them. They did not come to establish freedom to worship God, for all men, but only for themselves. The State was founded upon the Church, and the Church was their theology. To attack that, therefore, was to endanger the foundation of the Commonwealth. In fact, the Puritan's maxim was simply, hands off! It was very much the principle upon which most men conduct their business: you let me alone, and I will let you alone. If Roger Williams chose to paddle down the Seekonk and pitch his tent upon the Narragansett shore, it is easy to imagine the sturdy old Puritans growling "Amen: let him go to the dogs his own quiet Connecticut Valley there were plainly no superfluous smiles. His yea was terribly yea, and his nay, nay. Hard working by day was followed by hard reading at night. Had he fair-haired young children, rosy little lads and lasses, who climbed up on the arms of sad-colored leather chairs to find some story-book in his library—or were they already ticoats, and held a story-book to be Satan's ambush? Puritan lads and lasses, frolicsome as all children are, at what period of their lives was it that they emerged into the solemn bigot? Nature seemed to be reversed a little. It was the butterfly went backward to the worm. way!" Their persecution of others was discipline | do the Lord's will, whatever the Legislature might rather than proselyting. Papal persecution insisted say. Upon the face of this tough citizen of the upon saving people at all events, either by the water of baptism or by the fire of the stake; but Puritan persecution cared less for saving heretics than that they should depart out of sight, while upon its own members its iron hand lay heavy and inflexible. But nothing less than that iron hand would have been strong enough to do the work the Puritans were set to do in the world. They have been paint-"convicted of sin" before they were out of their peted often enough as sour, gloomy, and morose. Their great delineator in our literature, Hawthorne, has added even a deeper hue of sobriety to their long visages. Reading his sketches of Puritan life and character, one can hardly imagine that the sun shone brightly over old New England. And yet how essential exactly their characteristics were to the civilization of the New World, and to the censure of the land they left! An article in a late number of this Magazine upon the "Puritans and the Players" shows, with great felicity and familiarity with the subject, the necessity of the uncompromising rebuke of the Puritans for the rescue of English society from the enervating corruption of skepticism and utter sensuality. In the matter of theatres they were the total abstinents. As the temperance reformers declare that there can be no such thing as moderation in drinking poison, so the stalwart iconoclasts who built New England insisted that there could be no innocent playing with the devil. You might not feel your fingers singe at the moment, but presently you would find an ugly scar. Yet in the little glimpse here given us of the interior of a Puritan home, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, we can see the mould in which the modern men of his kind have been cast. We can understand that when his State adopted Algernon Sidney's famous motto, Ense petit sub libertate quietem, it was with a perfect consciousness that peace and liberty might depend upon the sword, and a perfect willingness to use it to secure peace and liberty. The old Puritan's children have multiplied in the land, and his ghost grimly smiles, doubtless, as he sees the liberty and peace that his fathers' swords founded taught in the "library" and maintained by the "armory" of his children. Here is the inventory: A Great Bible. 2 Small Bibles. 1 French Convert. 1 Psalter 1 Gospel Remission. 1 Young Man's Guide. It is only to repeat history to say that the Puritan element has saved our civilization. It is the moral influence in it. What kind of England would the England that had sprung from Charles First and Second, and James Second, be? If the Revolution of 1688 was the regeneration of England, Puritanism was the controlling influence of that revolution. The Jacobites were the logical descendants of the Cava- 1 God's Call to England. liers, and it is because the Cavaliers followed their 1 How to Keep the Heart. love-locks to decay, and because the Jacobites dwin- 1 Blessed Remedy. dled to a faction whose ardor was expended in drain-1 Groans of the Damned. ing bumpers to the King over the water, that the 1 Baxter's Now or Never. great course of British civilization has been maintained at home, and that the finest flower of its principle blooms upon this Continent. The Easy Chair is not from Massachusetts, and may therefore say that that State to which the Puritans first came, and in which the Puritan influence has been most active, is to-day the foremost of all human societies, politically, morally, and socially. It is the community in which the average of universal well-being is higher than in any State in history. Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any community in the world. Yet it had bleak beginnings in the icy coast, the hard shore, the sombre pines, and the savages, as in the grim bigotry, the sad philosophy, the intolerable virtues, the witchburnings, the Baptist and Quaker hangings of its early settlement. Out of that nettle came this flower. Out of the austere Puritan of 1620 the genial gentleman of 1860. In the letter of the Easy Chair's correspondent is a portrait of the Puritan, vividly drawn, as our friend truly says, merely by the inventory of his books and his weapons. It is taken from his will, entered for probate in 1711, and appears under the heads of "Library" and "Armory." Among all the polemics, exhortations, and ethics, there is but one law-book mentioned, and that not even by name. The Puritan lived to the higher law. He meant to 1 Discourse on Witchcraft. 1 Barbarian Cruelty. 1 New Psalm-Book. 1 Thirsty Sinner. 1 Preparation to Die. 1 Good Fetched out of Evil. 1 Abraham's Privilege. 1 Inexcusablences. 1 Essay to do Good. 1 Catechism. Russell's Works, ARMORY. 1 Long Gun. 1 Carbine. 1 Ditto. 1 Backsword and Belt. 1 Black Silk Belt. 1 Partisan. 1 Gun Rest. 3 Half Pikes. 1 Cartouch-Box and Ammunition. 1 Ditto, ditto, ditto. 1 Pouch with Bullets. 1 Pound of Bullets, 1 Pound of Powder & Horns. 1 Bag of Flints. Editor's Drawer. VERY body reads the Drawer, and, if we may EVER judge of the rest of mankind from those who write to us, the Drawer is the first part of this Monthly that is opened when it comes into the hands of its anxious readers. One of them signs himself "An Admirer," and wishes the Magazine were all Drawer, like the old woman who wanted her cow cut up into "tender loin." But too much of a good thing spoils the whole, and therefore the Drawer extends itself only to such a length as to tickle the taste without cloying it. Because every body is sure to see it, we put the |