"O merciful God! I cannot shun Thy presence,

For through its veil of flesh Thy piercing eye

Looketh upon my spirit's unsoiled essence,

As through the pure transparence of the sky;

Let not the oppressor clap his bloody hands,

As o'er my prostrate innocence he stands!

"But if, alas, it seemeth good to Thee

That I should perish as the guilty dies,

And that in death my foes should gaze on me

With hateful malice and exulting eyes,

Speak Thou the word, and bid them shed my blood,

Fully in me Thy will be done, O God!"

On arriving at the fatal spot, he sat down as ordered, on a bench, with

his back to the soldiers. The multitude recollected that in some

affecting lines, written by the conspirator in prison, he had said that

it would be useless to seek to kill him by shooting his body,--that his

heart must be pierced ere it would cease its throbbings. At the last

moment, just as the soldiers were about to fire, he rose up and gazed for

an instant around and above him on the beautiful capital of his native

land and its sail-flecked bay, on the dense crowds about him, the blue

mountains in the distance, and the sky glorious with summer sunshine.

"Adios, mundo!" (Farewell, world!) he said calmly, and sat down. The

word was given, and five balls entered his body. Then it was that,

amidst the groans and murmurs of the horror-stricken spectators, he rose

up once more, and turned his head to the shuddering soldiers, his face

wearing an expression of superhuman courage. "Will no one pity me?" he

said, laying his hand over his heart. "Here, fire here!" While he yet

spake, two balls entered his heart, and he fell dead.

Thus perished the hero poet of Cuba. He has not fallen in vain. His

genius and his heroic death will doubtless be regarded by his race as

precious legacies. To the great names of L'Ouverture and Petion the

colored man can now add that of Juan Placido.

PERSONAL SKETCHES AND TRIBUTES

THE FUNERAL OF TORREY.

Charles T. Torrey, an able young Congregational clergyman, died May

9, 1846, in the state's prison of Maryland, for the offence of

aiding slaves to escape from bondage. His funeral in Boston,

attended by thousands, was a most impressive occasion. The

following is an extract from an article written for the _Essex

Transcript_:--

Some seven years ago, we saw Charles T. Torrey for the first time. His

wife was leaning on his arm,--young, loving, and beautiful; the heart

that saw them blessed them. Since that time, we have known him as a most

energetic and zealous advocate of the anti-slavery cause. He had fine

talents, improved by learning and observation, a clear, intensely active

intellect, and a heart full of sympathy and genial humanity. It was with

strange and bitter feelings that we bent over his coffin and looked upon

his still face. The pity which we had felt for him in his long

sufferings gave place to indignation against his murderers. Hateful

beyond the power of expression seemed the tyranny which had murdered him

with the slow torture of the dungeon. May God forgive us, if for the

moment we felt like grasping His dread prerogative of vengeance. As we

passed out of the hall, a friend grasped our hand hard, his eye flashing

through its tears, with a stern reflection of our own emotions, while he

whispered through his pressed lips: "It is enough to turn every anti-

slavery heart into steel." Our blood boiled; we longed to see the wicked

apologists of slavery--the blasphemous defenders of it in Church and

State--led up to the coffin of our murdered brother, and there made to

feel that their hands had aided in riveting the chain upon those still

limbs, and in shutting out from those cold lips the free breath of

heaven.

A long procession followed his remains to their resting-place at Mount

Auburn. A monument to his memory will be raised in that cemetery, in the

midst of the green beauty of the scenery which he loved in life, and side

by side with the honored dead of Massachusetts. Thither let the friends

of humanity go to gather fresh strength from the memory of the martyr.

There let the slaveholder stand, and as he reads the record of the

enduring marble commune with his own heart, and feel that sorrow which

worketh repentance.

The young, the beautiful, the brave!--he is safe now from the malice of

his enemies. Nothing can harm him more. His work for the poor and

helpless was well and nobly done. In the wild woods of Canada, around

many a happy fireside and holy family altar, his name is on the lips of

God's poor. He put his soul in their souls' stead; he gave his life for

those who had no claim on his love save that of human brotherhood. How

poor, how pitiful and paltry, seem our labors! How small and mean our

trials and sacrifices! May the spirit of the dead be with us, and infuse

into our hearts something of his own deep sympathy, his hatred of

injustice, his strong faith and heroic endurance. May that spirit be

gladdened in its present sphere by the increased zeal and faithfulness of

the friends he has left behind.

EDWARD EVERETT.

A letter to Robert C. Waterston.

Amesbury, 27th 1st Month, 1865.

I acknowledge through thee the invitation of the standing committee of

the Massachusetts Historical Society to be present at a special meeting

of the Society for the purpose of paying a tribute to the memory of our

late illustrious associate, Edward Everett.

It is a matter of deep regret to me that the state of my health will not

permit me to be with you on an occasion of so much interest.

It is most fitting that the members of the Historical Society of

Massachusetts should add their tribute to those which have been already

offered by all sects, parties, and associations to the name and fame of

their late associate. He was himself a maker of history, and part and

parcel of all the noble charities and humanizing influences of his State

and time.

When the grave closed over him who added new lustre to the old and

honored name of Quincy, all eyes instinctively turned to Edward Everett

as the last of that venerated class of patriotic civilians who, outliving

all dissent and jealousy and party prejudice, held their reputation by

the secure tenure of the universal appreciation of its worth as a common

treasure of the republic. It is not for me to pronounce his eulogy.

Others, better qualified by their intimate acquaintance with him, have

done and will do justice to his learning, eloquence, varied culture, and

social virtues. My secluded country life has afforded me few

opportunities of personal intercourse with him, while my pronounced

radicalism on the great question which has divided popular feeling

rendered our political paths widely divergent. Both of us early saw the

danger which threatened the country. In the language of the prophet, we

"saw the sword coming upon the land," but while he believed in the

possibility of averting it by concession and compromise, I, on the

contrary, as firmly believed that such a course could only strengthen and

confirm what I regarded as a gigantic conspiracy against the rights and

liberties, the union and the life, of the nation.

Recent events have certainly not tended to change this belief on my part;

but in looking over the past, while I see little or nothing to retract in

the matter of opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that through the

very intensity of my convictions I may have done injustice to the motives

of those with whom I differed. As respects Edward Everett, it seems to

me that only within the last four years I have truly known him.

In that brief period, crowded as it is with a whole life-work of

consecration to the union, freedom, and glory of his country, he not only

commanded respect and reverence, but concentrated upon himself in a most

remarkable degree the love of all loyal and generous hearts. We have

seen, in these years of trial, very great sacrifices offered upon the

altar of patriotism,--wealth, ease, home, love, life itself. But Edward

Everett did more than this: he laid on that altar not only his time,

talents, and culture, but his pride of opinion, his long-cherished views

of policy, his personal and political predilections and prejudices, his

constitutional fastidiousness of conservatism, and the carefully

elaborated symmetry of his public reputation. With a rare and noble

magnanimity, he met, without hesitation, the demand of the great

occasion. Breaking away from all the besetments of custom and

association, he forgot the things that are behind, and, with an eye

single to present duty, pressed forward towards the mark of the high

calling of Divine Providence in the events of our time. All honor to

him! If we mourn that he is now beyond the reach of our poor human

praise, let us reverently trust that he has received that higher plaudit:

"Well done, thou good and faithful servant!"

When I last met him, as my colleague in the Electoral College of

Massachusetts, his look of health and vigor seemed to promise us many

years of his wisdom and usefulness. On greeting him I felt impelled to

express my admiration and grateful appreciation of his patriotic labors;

and I shall never forget how readily and gracefully he turned attention

from himself to the great cause in which we had a common interest, and

expressed his thankfulness that he had still a country to serve.

To keep green the memory of such a man is at once a privilege and a duty.

That stainless life of seventy years is a priceless legacy. His hands

were pure. The shadow of suspicion never fell on him. If he erred in

his opinions (and that he did so he had the Christian grace and courage

to own), no selfish interest weighed in the scale of his judgment against

truth.

As our thoughts follow him to his last resting-place, we are sadly

reminded of his own touching lines, written many years ago at Florence.

The name he has left behind is none the less "pure" that instead of being

"humble," as he then anticipated, it is on the lips of grateful millions,

and written ineffaceable on the record of his country's trial and

triumph:--

"Yet not for me when I shall fall asleep

Shall Santa Croce's lamps their vigils keep.

Beyond the main in Auburn's quiet shade,

With those I loved and love my couch be made;

Spring's pendant branches o'er the hillock wave,

And morning's dewdrops glisten on my grave,

While Heaven's great arch shall rise above my bed,

When Santa Croce's crumbles on her dead,--

Unknown to erring or to suffering fame,

So may I leave a pure though humble name."

Congratulating the Society on the prospect of the speedy consummation of

the great objects of our associate's labors,--the peace and permanent

union of our country,--

I am very truly thy friend.

LEWIS TAPPAN. (1873.)

One after another, those foremost in the antislavery conflict of the last

half century are rapidly passing away. The grave has just closed over

all that was mortal of Salmon P. Chase, the kingliest of men, a statesman

second to no other in our history, too great and pure for the Presidency,

yet leaving behind him a record which any incumbent of that station might

envy,--and now the telegraph brings us the tidings of the death of Lewis

Tappan, of Brooklyn, so long and so honorably identified with the anti-

slavery cause, and with every philanthropic and Christian enterprise. He

was a native of Massachusetts, born at Northampton in 1788, of Puritan

lineage,--one of a family remarkable for integrity, decision of

character, and intellectual ability. At the very outset, in company with

his brother Arthur, he devoted his time, talents, wealth, and social

position to the righteous but unpopular cause of Emancipation, and

became, in consequence, a mark for the persecution which followed such

devotion. His business was crippled, his name cast out as evil, his

dwelling sacked, and his furniture dragged into the street and burned.

Yet he never, in the darkest hour, faltered or hesitated for a moment.

He knew he was right, and that the end would justify him; one of the

cheerfullest of men, he was strong where others were weak, hopeful where

others despaired. He was wise in counsel, and prompt in action; like

Tennyson's Sir Galahad,

"His strength was as the strength of ten,

Because his heart was pure."

I met him for the first time forty years ago, at the convention which

formed the American Anti-Slavery Society, where I chanced to sit by him

as one of the secretaries. Myself young and inexperienced, I remember

how profoundly I was impressed by his cool self-possession, clearness of

perception, and wonderful executive ability. Had he devoted himself to

party politics with half the zeal which he manifested in behalf of those

who had no votes to give and no honors to bestow, he could have reached

the highest offices in the land. He chose his course, knowing all that

he renounced, and he chose it wisely. He never, at least, regretted it.

And now, at the ripe age of eighty-five years, the brave old man has

passed onward to the higher life, having outlived here all hatred, abuse,

and misrepresentation, having seen the great work of Emancipation

completed, and white men and black men equal before the law. I saw him

for the last time three years ago, when he was preparing his valuable

biography of his beloved brother Arthur. Age had begun to tell upon his

constitution, but his intellectual force was not abated. The old,

pleasant laugh and playful humor remained. He looked forward to the

close of life hopefully, even cheerfully, as he called to mind the dear

friends who had passed on before him, to await his coming.

Of the sixty-three signers of the Anti-Slavery Declaration at the

Philadelphia Convention in 1833, probably not more than eight or ten are

now living.

"As clouds that rake the mountain summits,

As waves that know no guiding hand,

So swift has brother followed brother

From sunshine to the sunless land."

Yet it is a noteworthy fact that the oldest member of that convention,

David Thurston, D. D., of Maine, lived to see the slaves emancipated, and

to mingle his voice of thanksgiving with the bells that rang in the day

of universal freedom.

BAYARD TAYLOR

Read at the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 10, 1879.

I am not able to attend the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple on the

10th instant, but my heart responds to any testimonial appreciative of

the intellectual achievements and the noble and manly life of Bayard

Taylor. More than thirty years have intervened between my first meeting

him in the fresh bloom of his youth and hope and honorable ambition, and

my last parting with him under the elms of Boston Common, after our visit

to Richard H. Dana, on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of that

honored father of American poetry, still living to lament the death of

his younger disciple and friend. How much he has accomplished in these

years! The most industrious of men, slowly, patiently, under many

disadvantages, he built up his splendid reputation. Traveller, editor,

novelist, translator, diplomatist, and through all and above all poet,

what he was he owed wholly to himself. His native honesty was satisfied

with no half tasks. He finished as he went, and always said and did his

best.

It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature.

His picturesque books of travel, his Oriental lyrics, his Pennsylvanian

idyls, his Centennial ode, the pastoral beauty and Christian sweetness of

Lars, and the high argument and rhythmic marvel of Deukalion are sureties

of the permanence of his reputation. But at this moment my thoughts

dwell rather upon the man than the author. The calamity of his death,

felt in both hemispheres, is to me and to all who intimately knew and

loved him a heavy personal loss. Under the shadow of this bereavement,

in the inner circle of mourning, we sorrow most of all that we shall see

his face no more, and long for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the

sound of a voice that is still."

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

Read at the dedication of the Channing Memorial Church at Newport, R. I.

DANVERS, MASS., 3d Mo., 13, 1880.

I scarcely need say that I yield to no one in love and reverence for the

great and good man whose memory, outliving all prejudices of creed, sect,

and party, is the common legacy of Christendom. As the years go on, the

value of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, in

doctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which are

above and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma.

His ethical severity and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong and

oppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas for

self-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his precept

and example of unquestioning obedience to duty and the voice of God in

his soul, can never become obsolete. It is very fitting that his memory

should be especially cherished with that of Hopkins and Berkeley in the

beautiful island to which the common residence of those worthies has lent

additional charms and interest.

DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.

A letter written to W. H. B. Currier, of Amesbury, Mass.

DANVERS, MASS., 9th Mo., 24, 1881.

I regret that it is not in my power to join the citizens of Amesbury and

Salisbury in the memorial services on the occasion of the death of our

lamented President. But in heart and sympathy I am with you. I share

the great sorrow which overshadows the land; I fully appreciate the

irretrievable loss. But it seems to me that the occasion is one for

thankfulness as well as grief.

Through all the stages of the solemn tragedy which has just closed with

the death of our noblest and best, I have felt that the Divine Providence

was overruling the mighty affliction,--that the patient sufferer at

Washington was drawing with cords of sympathy all sections and parties

nearer to each other. And now, when South and North, Democrat and

Republican, Radical and Conservative, lift their voices in one unbroken

accord of lamentation; when I see how, in spite of the greed of gain, the

lust of office, the strifes and narrowness of party politics, the great

heart of the nation proves sound and loyal, I feel a new hope for the

republic, I have a firmer faith in its stability. It is said that no man

liveth and no man dieth to himself; and the pure and noble life of

Garfield, and his slow, long martyrdom, so bravely borne in view of all,

are, I believe, bearing for us as a people "the peaceable fruits of

righteousness." We are stronger, wiser, better, for them.

With him it is well. His mission fulfilled, he goes to his grave by the

Lakeside honored and lamented as man never was before. The whole world

mourns him. There is no speech nor language where the voice of his

praise is not heard. About his grave gather, with heads uncovered, the

vast brotherhood of man.

And with us it is well, also. We are nearer a united people than ever

before. We are at peace with all; our future is full of promise; our

industrial and financial condition is hopeful. God grant that, while our

material interests prosper, the moral and spiritual influence of the

occasion may be permanently felt; that the solemn sacrament of Sorrow,

whereof we have been made partakers, may be blest to the promotion of the

righteousness which exalteth a nation.

LYDIA MARIA CHILD.

In 1882 a collection of the Letters of Lydia Maria Child was

published, for which I wrote the following sketch, as an

introduction:--

In presenting to the public this memorial volume, its compilers deemed

that a brief biographical introduction was necessary; and as a labor of

love I have not been able to refuse their request to prepare it.

Lydia Maria Francis was born in Medford, Massachusetts, February 11,

1802. Her father, Convers Francis, was a worthy and substantial citizen

of that town. Her brother, Convers Francis, afterwards theological

professor in Harvard College, was some years older than herself, and

assisted her in her early home studies, though, with the perversity of an

elder brother, he sometimes mystified her in answering her questions.

Once, when she wished to know what was meant by Milton's "raven down of

darkness," which was made to smile when smoothed, he explained that it

was only the fur of a black cat, which sparkled when stroked! Later in

life this brother wrote of her, "She has been a dear, good sister to me

would that I had been half as good a brother to her." Her earliest

teacher was an aged spinster, known in the village as "Marm Betty,"

painfully shy, and with many oddities of person and manner, the never-

forgotten calamity of whose life was that Governor Brooks once saw her

drinking out of the nose of her tea-kettle. Her school was in her

bedroom, always untidy, and she was a constant chewer of tobacco but the

children were fond of her, and Maria and her father always carried her a

good Sunday dinner. Thomas W. Higginson, in _Eminent Women of the Age_,

mentions in this connection that, according to an established custom, on

the night before Thanksgiving "all the humble friends of the Francis

household--Marm Betty, the washerwoman, wood-sawyer, and journeymen, some

twenty or thirty in all--were summoned to a preliminary entertainment.

They there partook of an immense chicken pie, pumpkin pie made in milk-

pans, and heaps of doughnuts. They feasted in the large, old-fashioned

kitchen, and went away loaded with crackers and bread and pies, not

forgetting 'turnovers' for the children. Such plain application of the

doctrine that it is more blessed to give than receive may have done more

to mould the character of Lydia Maria Child of maturer years than all the

faithful labors of good Dr. Osgood, to whom she and her brother used to

repeat the Assembly's catechism once a month."

Her education was limited to the public schools, with the exception of

one year at a private seminary in her native town. From a note by her

brother, Dr. Francis, we learn that when twelve years of age she went to

Norridgewock, Maine, where her married sister resided. At Dr. Brown's,

in Skowhegan, she first read _Waverley_. She was greatly excited, and

exclaimed, as she laid down the book, "Why cannot I write a novel?"

She remained in Norridgewock and vicinity for several years, and on her

return to Massachusetts took up her abode with her brother at Watertown.

He encouraged her literary tastes, and it was in his study that she

commenced her first story, _Hobomok_, which she published in the twenty-

first year of her age. The success it met with induced her to give to

the public, soon after, _The Rebels: a Tale of the Revolution_, which was

at once received into popular favor, and ran rapidly through several

editions. Then followed in close succession _The Mother's Book_, running

through eight American editions, twelve English, and one German, _The

Girl's Book_, the _History of Women_, and the _Frugal Housewife_, of

which thirty-five editions were published. Her _Juvenile Miscellany_ was

commenced in 1826.

It is not too much to say that half a century ago she was the most

popular literary woman in the United States. She had published

historical novels of unquestioned power of description and

characterization, and was widely and favorably known as the editor of the

_Juvenile Miscellany_, which was probably the first periodical in the

English tongue devoted exclusively to children, and to which she was by

far the largest contributor. Some of the tales and poems from her pen

were extensively copied and greatly admired. It was at this period that

the _North American Review_, the highest literary authority of the

country, said of her, "We are not sure that any woman of our country

could outrank Mrs. Child. This lady has been long before the public as

an author with much success. And she well deserves it, for in all her

works nothing can be found which does not commend itself, by its tone of

healthy morality and good sense. Few female writers, if any, have done

more or better things for our literature in the lighter or graver

departments."

Comparatively young, she had placed herself in the front rank of American

authorship. Her books and her magazine had a large circulation, and were

affording her a comfortable income, at a time when the rewards of

authorship were uncertain and at the best scanty.

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, Esq., a young and able lawyer, and

took up her residence in Boston. In 1831-32 both became deeply

interested in the subject of slavery, through the writings and personal

influence of William Lloyd Garrison. Her husband, a member of the

Massachusetts legislature and editor of the _Massachusetts Journal_, had,

at an earlier date, denounced the project of the dismemberment of Mexico

for the purpose of strengthening and extending American slavery. He was

one of the earliest members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and

his outspoken hostility to the peculiar institution greatly and

unfavorably affected his interests as a lawyer. In 1832 he addressed a

series of able letters on slavery and the slave-trade to Edward S. Abdy,

a prominent English philanthropist. In 1836 he published in Philadelphia

ten strongly written articles on the same subject. He visited England

and France in 1837, and while in Paris addressed an elaborate memoir to

the Societe pour l'Abolition d'Esclavage, and a paper on the same subject

to the editor of the _Eclectic Review_, in London. To his facts and

arguments John Quincy Adams was much indebted in the speeches which he

delivered in Congress on the Texas question.

In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed by a convention in

Philadelphia. Its numbers were small, and it was everywhere spoken

against. It was at this time that Lydia Maria Child startled the country

by the publication of her noble _Appeal in Behalf of that Class of

Americans called Africans_. It is quite impossible for any one of the

present generation to imagine the popular surprise and indignation which

the book called forth, or how entirely its author cut herself off from

the favor and sympathy of a large number of those who had previously

delighted to do her honor. Social and literary circles, which had been

proud of her presence, closed their doors against her. The sale of her

books, the subscriptions to her magazine, fell off to a ruinous extent.

She knew all she was hazarding, and made the great sacrifice, prepared

for all the consequences which followed. In the preface to her book she

says, "I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have

undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, I do not fear them.

A few years hence, the opinion of the world will be a matter in which I

have not even the most transient interest; but this book will be abroad

on its mission of humanity long after the hand that wrote it is mingling

with the dust. Should it be the means of advancing, even one single

hour, the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange

the consciousness for all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame."

Thenceforth her life was a battle; a constant rowing hard against the

stream of popular prejudice and hatred. And through it all--pecuniary

privation, loss of friends and position, the painfulness of being

suddenly thrust from "the still air of delightful studies" into the

bitterest and sternest controversy of the age--she bore herself with

patience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance upon the justice and ultimate

triumph of the cause she had espoused. Her pen was never idle. Wherever

there was a brave word to be spoken, her voice was heard, and never

without effect. It is not exaggeration to say that no man or woman at

that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or

made such a "great renunciation" in doing it.

A practical philanthropist, she had the courage of her convictions, and

from the first was no mere closet moralist or sentimental bewailer of the

woes of humanity. She was the Samaritan stooping over the wounded Jew.

She calmly and unflinchingly took her place by the side, of the despised

slave and free man of color, and in word and act protested against the

cruel prejudice which shut out its victims from the rights and privileges

of American citizens. Her philanthropy had no taint of fanaticism;

throughout the long struggle, in which she was a prominent actor, she

kept her fine sense of humor, good taste, and sensibility to the

beautiful in art and nature.

The opposition she met with from those who had shared her confidence

and friendship was of course keenly felt, but her kindly and genial

disposition remained unsoured. She rarely spoke of her personal

trials, and never posed as a martyr. The nearest approach to

anything like complaint is in the following lines, the date of which

I have not been able to ascertain:--

THE WORLD THAT I AM PASSING THROUGH.

Few in the days of early youth

Trusted like me in love and truth.

I've learned sad lessons from the years,

But slowly, and with many tears;

For God made me to kindly view

The world that I am passing through.

Though kindness and forbearance long

Must meet ingratitude and wrong,

I still would bless my fellow-men,

And trust them though deceived again.

God help me still to kindly view

The world that I am passing through.

From all that fate has brought to me

I strive to learn humility,

And trust in Him who rules above,

Whose universal law is love.

Thus only can I kindly view

The world that I am passing through.

When I approach the setting sun,

And feel my journey well-nigh done,

May Earth be veiled in genial light,

And her last smile to me seem bright.

Help me till then to kindly view

The world that I am passing through.

And all who tempt a trusting heart

From faith and hope to drift apart,

May they themselves be spared the pain

Of losing power to trust again.

God help us all to kindly view

The world that we are passing through.

While faithful to the great duty which she felt was laid upon her in an

especial manner, she was by no means a reformer of one idea, but her

interest was manifested in every question affecting the welfare of

humanity. Peace, temperance, education, prison reform, and equality of

civil rights, irrespective of sex, engaged her attention. Under all the

disadvantages of her estrangement from popular favor, her charming Greek

romance of _Philothea_ and her _Lives of Madame Roland_ and the _Baroness

de Stael_ proved that her literary ability had lost nothing of its

strength, and that the hand which penned such terrible rebukes had still

kept its delicate touch, and gracefully yielded to the inspiration of

fancy and art. While engaged with her husband in the editorial

supervision of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, she wrote her admirable

_Letters from New York_; humorous, eloquent, and picturesque, but still

humanitarian in tone, which extorted the praise of even a pro-slavery

community. Her great work, in three octavo volumes, _The Progress of

Religious Ideas_, belongs, in part, to that period. It is an attempt to

represent in a candid, unprejudiced manner the rise and progress of the

great religions of the world, and their ethical relations to each other.

She availed herself of, and carefully studied, the authorities at that

time accessible, and the result is creditable to her scholarship,

industry, and conscientiousness. If, in her desire to do justice to the

religions of Buddha and Mohammed, in which she has been followed by

Maurice, Max Muller, and Dean Stanley, she seems at times to dwell upon

the best and overlook the darker features of those systems, her

concluding reflections should vindicate her from the charge of

undervaluing the Christian faith, or of lack of reverent appreciation of

its founder. In the closing chapter of her work, in which the large

charity and broad sympathies of her nature are manifest, she thus turns

with words of love, warm from the heart, to Him whose Sermon on the Mount

includes most that is good and true and vital in the religions and

philosophies of the world:--

"It was reserved for Him to heal the brokenhearted, to preach a gospel to

the poor, to say, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved

much.' Nearly two thousand years have passed away since these words of

love and pity were uttered, yet when I read them my eyes fill with tears.

I thank Thee, O Heavenly Father, for all the messengers thou hast sent to

man; but, above all, I thank Thee for Him, thy beloved Son! Pure lily

blossom of the centuries, taking root in the lowliest depths, and

receiving the light and warmth of heaven in its golden heart! All that

the pious have felt, all that poets have said, all that artists have

done, with their manifold forms of beauty, to represent the ministry of

Jesus, are but feeble expressions of the great debt we owe Him who is

even now curing the lame, restoring sight to the blind, and raising the

dead in that spiritual sense wherein all miracle is true."

During her stay in New York, as editor of the _Anti-Slavery Standard_,

she found a pleasant home at the residence of the genial philanthropist,

Isaac T. Hopper, whose remarkable life she afterwards wrote. Her

portrayal of this extraordinary man, so brave, so humorous, so tender and

faithful to his convictions of duty, is one of the most readable pieces

of biography in English literature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a

discriminating paper published in 1869, speaks of her eight years'

sojourn in New York as the most interesting and satisfactory period of

her whole life. "She was placed where her sympathetic nature found

abundant outlet and occupation. Dwelling in a house where

disinterestedness and noble labor were as daily breath, she had great

opportunities. There was no mere alms-giving; but sin and sorrow must

be brought home to the fireside and the heart; the fugitive slave, the

drunkard, the outcast woman, must be the chosen guests of the abode,--

must be taken, and held, and loved into reformation or hope."

It would be a very imperfect representation of Maria Child which regarded

her only from a literary point of view. She was wise in counsel; and men

like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew

availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and

measures. Her pen was busy with correspondence, and whenever a true man

or a good cause needed encouragement, she was prompt to give it. Her

donations for benevolent causes and beneficent reforms were constant and

liberal; and only those who knew her intimately could understand the

cheerful and unintermitted self-denial which alone enabled her to make

them. She did her work as far as possible out of sight, without noise or

pretension. Her time, talents, and money were held not as her own, but a

trust from the Eternal Father for the benefit of His suffering children.

Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which she

wore it. Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, or

among the poor and afflicted in the neighborhood of her country home, no

story of suffering and need, capable of alleviation, ever reached her

without immediate sympathy and corresponding action. Lowell, one of her

warmest admirers, in his _Fable for Critics_ has beautifully portrayed

her abounding benevolence:--

"There comes Philothea, her face all aglow:

She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe,

And can't tell which pleases her most, to relieve

His want, or his story to hear and believe.

No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,

For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;

She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,

And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood."

"The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,

But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,

And folks with a mission that nobody knows

Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose.

She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope

Converge to some focus of rational hope,

And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall

Can transmute into honey,--but this is not all;

Not only for those she has solace; O, say,

Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,

Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,

To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,

Hast thou not found one shore where those tired, drooping feet

Could reach firm mother-earth, one full heart on whose beat

The soothed head in silence reposing could hear

The chimes of far childhood throb back on the ear?"

"Ah, there's many a beam from the fountain of day

That, to reach us unclouded, must pass, on its way,

Through the soul of a woman, and hers is wide ope

To the influence of Heaven as the blue eyes of Hope;

Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in

To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,

And to bring into each, or to find there, some line

Of the never completely out-trampled divine;

If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,

'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs again,

As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain

Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;

What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour,

Could they be as a Child but for one little hour!"

After leaving New York, her husband and herself took up their residence

in the rural town of Wayland, Mass. Their house, plain and

unpretentious, had a wide and pleasant outlook; a flower garden,

carefully tended by her own hands, in front, and on the side a fruit

orchard and vegetable garden, under the special care of her husband. The

house was always neat, with some appearance of unostentatious decoration,

evincing at once the artistic taste of the hostess and the conscientious

economy which forbade its indulgence to any great extent. Her home was

somewhat apart from the lines of rapid travel, and her hospitality was in

a great measure confined to old and intimate friends, while her visits to

the city were brief and infrequent. A friend of hers, who had ample

opportunities for a full knowledge of her home-life, says, "The domestic

happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Child seemed to me perfect. Their sympathies,

their admiration of all things good, and their hearty hatred of all

things mean and evil were in entire unison. Mr. Child shared his wife's

enthusiasms, and was very proud of her. Their affection, never paraded,

was always manifest. After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child, in speaking of

the future life, said, 'I believe it would be of small value to me if I

were not united to him.'"

In this connection I cannot forbear to give an extract from some

reminiscences of her husband, which she left among her papers, which,

better than any words of mine, will convey an idea of their simple and

beautiful home-life:--

"In 1852 we made a humble home in Wayland, Mass., where we spent twenty-

two pleasant years entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving

each other, and dependent upon each other for intellectual companionship.

I always depended on his richly stored mind, which was able and ready to

furnish needed information on any subject. He was my walking dictionary

of many languages, my Universal Encyclopaedia.

"In his old age he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of

my youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was often

singing,--

"'There's nothing half so sweet in life

As Love's old dream.'

"Very often, when he passed by me, he would lay his hand softly on my

head and murmur, 'Carum caput.' . . . But what I remember with the

most tender gratitude is his uniform patience and forbearance with my

faults. . . . He never would see anything but the bright side of my

character. He always insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was the

wisest and the wittiest, and that whatever I did was the best. The

simplest little jeu d'esprit of mine seemed to him wonderfully witty.

Once, when he said, 'I wish for your sake, dear, I were as rich as

Croesus,' I answered, 'You are Croesus, for you are king of Lydia.' How

often he used to quote that!

"His mind was unclouded to the last. He had a passion for philology, and

only eight hours before he passed away he was searching out the

derivation of a word."

Her well-stored mind and fine conversational gifts made her company

always desirable. No one who listened to her can forget the earnest

eloquence with which she used to dwell upon the evidences, from history,

tradition, and experience, of the superhuman and supernatural; or with

what eager interest she detected in the mysteries of the old religions of

the world the germs of a purer faith and a holier hope. She loved to

listen, as in St. Pierre's symposium of _The Coffee-House of Surat_,

to the confessions of faith of all sects and schools of philosophy,

Christian and pagan, and gather from them the consoling truth that our

Father has nowhere left his children without some witness of Himself.

She loved the old mystics, and lingered with curious interest and

sympathy over the writings of Bohme, Swedenborg, Molinos, and Woolman.

Yet this marked speculative tendency seemed not in the slightest degree

to affect her practical activities. Her mysticism and realism ran in

close parallel lines without interfering with each other.

With strong rationalistic tendencies from education and conviction, she

found herself in spiritual accord with the pious introversion of Thomas

a Kempis and Madame Guion. She was fond of Christmas Eve stories, of

warnings, signs, and spiritual intimations, her half belief in which

sometimes seemed like credulity to her auditors. James Russell Lowell,

in his tender tribute to her, playfully alludes to this characteristic:--

"She has such a musical taste that she 'll go

Any distance to hear one who draws a long bow.

She will swallow a wonder by mere might and main."

In 1859 the descent of John Brown upon Harper's Ferry, and his capture,

trial, and death, startled the nation. When the news reached her that

the misguided but noble old man lay desperately wounded in prison, alone

and unfriended, she wrote him a letter, under cover of one to Governor

Wise, asking permission to go and nurse and care for him. The expected

arrival of Captain Brown's wife made her generous offer unnecessary. The

prisoner wrote her, thanking her, and asking her to help his family, a

request with which she faithfully complied. With his letter came one

from Governor Wise, in courteous reproval of her sympathy for John Brown.

To this she responded in an able and effective manner. Her reply found

its way from Virginia to the New York Tribune, and soon after Mrs. Mason,

of King George's County, wife of Senator Mason, the author of the

infamous Fugitive Slave Law, wrote her a vehement letter, commencing with

threats of future damnation, and ending with assuring her that "no

Southerner, after reading her letter to Governor Wise, ought to read a

line of her composition, or touch a magazine which bore her name in its

list of contributors." To this she wrote a calm, dignified reply,

declining to dwell on the fierce invectives of her assailant, and wishing

her well here and hereafter. She would not debate the specific merits or

demerits of a man whose body was in charge of the courts, and whose

reputation was sure to be in charge of posterity. "Men," she continues,

"are of small consequence in comparison with principles, and the

principle for which John Brown died is the question at issue between us."

These letters were soon published in pamphlet form, and had the immense

circulation of 300,000 copies.

In 1867 she published _A Romance of the Republic_, a story of the days of

slavery; powerful in its delineation of some of the saddest as well as

the most dramatic conditions of master and slave in the Southern States.

Her husband, who had been long an invalid, died in 1874. After his death

her home, in winter especially, became a lonely one, and in 1877 she

began to spend the cold months in Boston.

Her last publication was in 1878, when her _Aspirations of the World_, a

book of selections, on moral and religious subjects, from the literature

of all nations and times, was given to the public. The introduction,

occupying fifty pages, shows, at threescore and ten, her mental vigor

unabated, and is remarkable for its wise, philosophic tone and felicity

of diction. It has the broad liberality of her more elaborate work on

the same subject, and in the mellow light of life's sunset her words seem

touched with a tender pathos and beauty. "All we poor mortals," she

says, "are groping our way through paths that are dim with shadows; and

we are all striving, with steps more or less stumbling, to follow some

guiding star. As we travel on, beloved companions of our pilgrimage

vanish from our sight, we know not whither; and our bereaved hearts utter

cries of supplication for more light. We know not where Hermes

Trismegistus lived, or who he was; but his voice sounds plaintively

human, coming up from the depths of the ages, calling out, 'Thou art God!

and thy man crieth these things unto Thee!' Thus closely allied in our

sorrows and limitations, in our aspirations and hopes, surely we ought

not to be separated in our sympathies. However various the names by

which we call the Heavenly Father, if they are set to music by brotherly

love, they can all be sung together."

Her interest in the welfare of the emancipated class at the South and of

the ill-fated Indians of the West remained unabated, and she watched with

great satisfaction the experiment of the education of both classes in

General Armstrong's institution at Hampton, Va. She omitted no

opportunity of aiding the greatest social reform of the age, which aims

to make the civil and political rights of women equal to those of men.

Her sympathies, to the last, went out instinctively to the wronged and

weak. She used to excuse her vehemence in this respect by laughingly

quoting lines from a poem entitled _The Under Dog in the Fight_:--

"I know that the world, the great big world,

Will never a moment stop

To see which dog may be in the wrong,

But will shout for the dog on top.

"But for me, I never shall pause to ask

Which dog may be in the right;

For my heart will beat, while it beats at all,

For the under dog in the fight."

I am indebted to a gentleman who was at one time a resident of Wayland,

and who enjoyed her confidence and warm friendship, for the following

impressions of her life in that place:--

"On one of the last beautiful Indian summer afternoons, closing the past

year, I drove through Wayland, and was anew impressed with the charm of

our friend's simple existence there. The tender beauty of the fading

year seemed a reflection of her own gracious spirit; the lovely autumn of

her life, whose golden atmosphere the frosts of sorrow and advancing age

had only clarified and brightened.

"My earliest recollection of Mrs. Child in Wayland is of a gentle face

leaning from the old stage window, smiling kindly down on the childish

figures beneath her; and from that moment her gracious motherly presence

has been closely associated with the charm of rural beauty in that

village, which until very lately has been quite apart from the line of

travel, and unspoiled by the rush and worry of our modern steam-car mode

of living.

"Mrs. Child's life in the place made, indeed, an atmosphere of its own, a

benison of peace and good-will, which was a noticeable feature to all who

were acquainted with the social feeling of the little community, refined,

as it was too, by the elevating influence of its distinguished pastor,

Dr. Sears. Many are the acts of loving kindness and maternal care which

could be chronicled of her residence there, were we permitted to do so;

and numberless are the lives that have gathered their onward impulse from

her helping hand. But it was all a confidence which she hardly betrayed

to her inmost self, and I will not recall instances which might be her

grandest eulogy. Her monument is builded in the hearts which knew her

benefactions, and it will abide with 'the power that makes for

righteousness.'

"One of the pleasantest elements of her life in Wayland was the high

regard she won from the people of the village, who, proud of her literary

attainment, valued yet more the noble womanhood of the friend who dwelt

so modestly among them. The grandeur of her exalted personal character

had, in part, eclipsed for them the qualities which made her fame with

the world outside.

"The little house on the quiet by-road overlooked broad green meadows.

The pond behind it, where bloom the lilies whose spotless purity may well

symbolize her gentle spirit, is a sacred pool to her townsfolk. But

perhaps the most fitting similitude of her life in Wayland was the quiet

flow of the river, whose gentle curves make green her meadows, but whose

powerful energy, joining the floods from distant mountains, moves, with

resistless might, the busy shuttles of a hundred mills. She was too

truthful to affect to welcome unwarrantable invaders of her peace, but no

weary traveller on life's hard ways ever applied to her in vain. The

little garden plot before her door was a sacred enclosure, not to be

rudely intruded upon; but the flowers she tended with maternal care were

no selfish possession, for her own enjoyment only, and many are the lives

their sweetness has gladdened forever. So she lived among a singularly

peaceful and intelligent community as one of themselves, industrious,

wise, and happy; with a frugality whose motive of wider benevolence was

in itself a homily and a benediction."

In my last interview with her, our conversation, as had often happened

before, turned upon the great theme of the future life. She spoke, as I

remember, calmly and not uncheerfully, but with the intense earnestness

and reverent curiosity of one who felt already the shadow of the unseen

world resting upon her.

Her death was sudden and quite unexpected. For some months she had been

troubled with a rheumatic affection, but it was by no means regarded as

serious. A friend, who visited her a few days before her departure,

found her in a comfortable condition, apart from lameness. She talked of

the coming election with much interest, and of her plans for the winter.

On the morning of her death (October 20, 1880) she spoke of feeling

remarkably well. Before leaving her chamber she complained of severe

pain in the region of the heart. Help was called by her companion, but

only reached her to witness her quiet passing away.

The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple. Many of her

old friends were present, and Wendell Phillips paid an affecting and

eloquent tribute to his old friend and anti-slavery coadjutor. He

referred to the time when she accepted, with serene self-sacrifice, the

obloquy which her _Appeal_ had brought upon her, and noted, as one of the

many ways in which popular hatred was manifested, the withdrawal from her

of the privileges of the Boston Athenaeum. Her pallbearers were elderly,

plain farmers in the neighborhood; and, led by the old white-haired

undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant burial-

ground, over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and tinder the half-

clouded October sky. A lover of all beautiful things, she was, as her

intimate friends knew, always delighted by the sight of rainbows, and

used to so arrange prismatic glasses as to throw the colors on the walls

of her room. Just after her body was consigned to the earth, a

magnificent rainbow spanned with its are of glory the eastern sky.

The incident at her burial is alluded to in a sonnet written by

William P. Andrews:--

"Freedom! she knew thy summons, and obeyed

That clarion voice as yet scarce heard of men;

Gladly she joined thy red-cross service when

Honor and wealth must at thy feet be laid

Onward with faith undaunted, undismayed

By threat or scorn, she toiled with hand and brain

To make thy cause triumphant, till the chain

Lay broken, and for her the freedmen prayed.

Nor yet she faltered; in her tender care

She took us all; and wheresoe'er she went,

Blessings, and Faith, and Beauty followed there,

E'en to the end, where she lay down content;

And with the gold light of a life more fair,

Twin bows of promise o'er her grave were blest."

The letters in this collection constitute but a small part of her large

correspondence. They have been gathered up and arranged by the hands of

dear relatives and friends as a fitting memorial of one who wrote from

the heart as well as the head, and who held her literary reputation

subordinate always to her philanthropic aim to lessen the sum of human

suffering, and to make the world better for her living. If they

sometimes show the heat and impatience of a zealous reformer, they may

well be pardoned in consideration of the circumstances under which they

were written, and of the natural indignation of a generous nature in view

of wrong and oppression. If she touched with no very reverent hand the

garment hem of dogmas, and held to the spirit of Scripture rather than

its letter, it must be remembered that she lived in a time when the Bible

was cited in defence of slavery, as it is now in Utah in support of

polygamy; and she may well be excused for some degree of impatience with

those who, in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin, neglected the

weightier matters of the law of justice and mercy.

Of the men and women directly associated with the beloved subject of this

sketch, but few are now left to recall her single-hearted devotion to

apprehended duty, her unselfish generosity, her love of all beauty and

harmony, and her trustful reverence, free from pretence and cant. It is

not unlikely that the surviving sharers of her love and friendship may

feel the inadequateness of this brief memorial, for I close it with the

consciousness of having failed to fully delineate the picture which my

memory holds of a wise and brave, but tender and loving woman, of whom it

might well have been said, in the words of the old Hebrew text, "Many,

daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

On the occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of Dr. Holmes _The

Critic of New York_ collected personal tributes from friends and

admirers of that author. My own contribution was as follows:--

Poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, scientist, ripe scholar, and wise

philosopher, if Dr. Holmes does not, at the present time, hold in popular

estimation the first place in American literature, his rare versatility

is the cause. In view of the inimitable prose writer, we forget the

poet; in our admiration of his melodious verse, we lose sight of _Elsie

Venner_ and _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. We laugh over his wit

and humor, until, to use his own words,

"We suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot,

As if Wisdom's old potato could not flourish at its root;"

and perhaps the next page melts us into tears by a pathos only equalled

by that of Sterne's sick Lieutenant. He is Montaigne and Bacon under one

hat. His varied qualities would suffice for the mental furnishing of

half a dozen literary specialists.

To those who have enjoyed the privilege of his intimate acquaintance, the

man himself is more than the author. His genial nature, entire freedom

from jealousy or envy, quick tenderness, large charity, hatred of sham,

pretence, and unreality, and his reverent sense of the eternal and

permanent have secured for him something more and dearer than literary

renown,--the love of all who know him. I might say much more: I could

not say less. May his life be long in the land.

Amesbury, Mass., 8th Month, 18, 1884.

LONGFELLOW

Written to the chairman of the committee of arrangements for

unveiling the bust of Longfellow at Portland, Maine, on the poet's

birthday, February 27, 1885.

I am sorry it is not in my power to accept the invitation of the

committee to be present at the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow on the

27th instant, or to write anything worthy of the occasion in metrical

form.

The gift of the Westminster Abbey committee cannot fail to add another

strong tie of sympathy between two great English-speaking peoples. And

never was gift more fitly bestowed. The city of Portland--the poet's

birthplace, "beautiful for situation," looking from its hills on the

scenery he loved so well, Deering's Oaks, the many-islanded bay and far

inland mountains, delectable in sunset--needed this sculptured

representation of her illustrious son, and may well testify her joy and

gratitude at its reception, and repeat in so doing the words of the

Hebrew prophet: "O man, greatly beloved! thou shalt stand in thy place."

OLD NEWBURY.

Letter to Samuel J. Spalding, D. D., on the occasion of the

celebration of the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Newbury.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I am sorry that I cannot hope to be with you on the

250th anniversary of the settlement of old Newbury. Although I can

hardly call myself a son of the ancient town, my grandmother, Sarah

Greenleaf, of blessed memory, was its daughter, and I may therefore claim

to be its grandson. Its genial and learned historian, Joshua Coffin, was

my first school-teacher, and all my life I have lived in sight of its

green hills and in hearing of its Sabbath bells. Its wealth of natural

beauty has not been left unsung by its own poets, Hannah Gould, Mrs.

Hopkins, George Lunt, and Edward A. Washburn, while Harriet Prescott

Spofford's Plum Island Sound is as sweet and musical as Tennyson's Brook.

Its history and legends are familiar to me. I seem to have known all its

old worthies, whose descendants have helped to people a continent, and

who have carried the name and memories of their birthplace to the Mexican

gulf and across the Rocky Mountains to the shores of the Pacific. They

were the best and selectest of Puritanism, brave, honest, God-fearing men

and women; and if their creed in the lapse of time has lost something of

its vigor, the influence of their ethical righteousness still endures.

The prophecy of Samuel Sewall that Christians should be found in Newbury

so long as pigeons shall roost on its oaks and Indian corn grows in

Oldtown fields remains still true, and we trust will always remain so.

Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself into

company too good for him. It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692

that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably,

of one of Hawthorne's weird _Twice Told Tales_; and there is a tradition

that, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury's

painful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by a

century) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, the

Adversary made his appearance in the shape of a black giant stalking

through Byfield. It was never, I believe, definitely settled whether he

was drawn there by the minister's zeal in defence of slavery or the

deacon's irreverent denial of the minister's right and duty to curse

Canaan in the person of his negro.

Old Newbury has sometimes been spoken of as ultra-conservative and

hostile to new ideas and progress, but this is not warranted by its

history. More than two centuries ago, when Major Pike, just across the

river, stood up and denounced in open town meeting the law against

freedom of conscience and worship, and was in consequence fined and

outlawed, some of Newbury's best citizens stood bravely by him. The town

took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and

town charges hanged for witches, "Goody" Morse had the spirit rappings in

her house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhat

later a Newbury minister, in wig and knee-buckles, rode, Bible in hand,

over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and was

stamping up and down stairs in his military boots.

Newbury's ingenious citizen, Jacob Perkins, in drawing out diseases with

his metallic tractors, was quite as successful as modern "faith and mind"

doctors. The Quakers, whipped at Hampton on one hand and at Salem on the

other, went back and forth unmolested in Newbury, for they could make no

impression on its iron-clad orthodoxy. Whitefield set the example, since

followed by the Salvation Army, of preaching in its streets, and now lies

buried under one of its churches with almost the honors of sainthood.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newbury. The town must be regarded as

the Alpha and Omega of anti-slavery agitation, beginning with its

abolition deacon and ending with Garrison. Puritanism, here as

elsewhere, had a flavor of radicalism; it had its humorous side, and its

ministers did not hesitate to use wit and sarcasm, like Elijah before the

priests of Baal. As, for instance, the wise and learned clergyman,

Puritan of the Puritans, beloved and reverenced by all, who has just laid

down the burden of his nearly one hundred years, startled and shamed his

brother ministers who were zealously for the enforcement of the Fugitive

Slave Law, by preparing for them a form of prayer for use while engaged

in catching runaway slaves.

I have, I fear, dwelt too long upon the story and tradition of the old

town, which will doubtless be better told by the orator of the day. The

theme is to me full of interest. Among the blessings which I would

gratefully own is the fact that my lot has been cast in the beautiful

valley of the Merrimac, within sight of Newbury steeples, Plum Island,

and Crane Neck and Pipe Stave hills.

Let me, in closing, pay something of the debt I have owed from boyhood,

by expressing a sentiment in which I trust every son of the ancient town

will unite: Joshua Coffin, historian of Newbury, teacher, scholar, and

antiquarian, and one of the earliest advocates of slave emancipation. May

his memory be kept green, to use the words of Judge Sewall, "so long as

Plum island keeps its post and a sturgeon leaps in Merrimac River."

Amesbury, 6th Month, 1885.

SCHOOLDAY REMEMBRANCES.

To Rev. Charles Wingate, Hon. James H. Carleton, Thomas B. Garland,

Esq., Committee of Students of Haverhill Academy:

DEAR FRIENDS,--I was most agreeably surprised last evening by receiving

your carefully prepared and beautiful Haverhill Academy Album, containing

the photographs of a large number of my old friends and schoolmates. I

know of nothing which could have given me more pleasure. If the faces

represented are not so unlined and ruddy as those which greeted each

other at the old academy, on the pleasant summer mornings so long ago,

when life was before us, with its boundless horizon of possibilities,

yet, as I look over them, I see that, on the whole, Time has not been

hard with us, but has touched us gently. The hieroglyphics he has traced

upon us may, indeed, reveal something of the cares, trials, and sorrows

incident to humanity, but they also tell of generous endeavor, beneficent

labor, developed character, and the slow, sure victories of patience and

fortitude. I turn to them with the proud satisfaction of feeling that I

have been highly favored in my early companions, and that I have not been

disappointed in my school friendships. The two years spent at the

academy I have always reckoned among the happiest of my life, though I

have abundant reason for gratitude that, in the long, intervening years,

I have been blessed beyond my deserving.

It has been our privilege to live in an eventful period, and to witness

wonderful changes since we conned our lessons together. How little we

then dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone! We

studied the history and geography of a world only half explored. Our

country was an unsolved mystery. "The Great American Desert" was an

awful blank on our school maps. We have since passed through the

terrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, and

made the union of the States an established fact, and no longer a

doubtful theory. If life is to be measured not so much by years as by

thoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a free

exercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselves

upon really outliving the venerable patriarchs. For myself, I would not

exchange a decade of my own life for a century of the Middle Ages, or a

"cycle of Cathay."

Let me, gentlemen, return my heartiest thanks to you, and to all who have

interested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assure

you of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, 12th Month, 25, 1885.

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.

I have been pained to learn of the decease of nay friend of many years,

Edwin P. Whipple. Death, however expected, is always something of a

surprise, and in his case I was not prepared for it by knowing of any

serious failure of his health. With the possible exception of Lowell and

Matthew Arnold, he was the ablest critical essayist of his time, and the

place he has left will not be readily filled.

Scarcely inferior to Macaulay in brilliance of diction and graphic

portraiture, he was freer from prejudice and passion, and more loyal to

the truth of fact and history. He was a thoroughly honest man. He wrote

with conscience always at his elbow, and never sacrificed his real

convictions for the sake of epigram and antithesis. He instinctively

took the right side of the questions that came before him for decision,

even when by so doing he ranked himself with the unpopular minority. He

had the manliest hatred of hypocrisy and meanness; but if his language

had at times the severity of justice, it was never merciless. He "set

down naught in malice."

Never blind to faults, he had a quick and sympathetic eye for any real

excellence or evidence of reserved strength in the author under

discussion.

He was a modest man, sinking his own personality out of sight, and he

always seemed to me more interested in the success of others than in his

own. Many of his literary contemporaries have had reason to thank him

not only for his cordial recognition and generous praise, but for the

firm and yet kindly hand which pointed out deficiencies and errors of

taste and judgment. As one of those who have found pleasure and profit

in his writings in the past, I would gratefully commend them to the

generation which survives him. His _Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_

is deservedly popular, but there are none of his Essays which will not

repay a careful study. "What works of Mr. Baxter shall I read?" asked

Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them," was the answer, "for they

are all good."

He will have an honored place in the history of American literature. But

I cannot now dwell upon his authorship while thinking of him as the

beloved member of a literary circle now, alas sadly broken. I recall the

wise, genial companion and faithful friend of nearly half a century, the

memory of whose words and acts of kindness moistens my eyes as I write.

It is the inevitable sorrow of age that one's companions must drop away

on the right hand and the left with increasing frequency, until we are

compelled to ask with Wordsworth,--

"Who next shall fall and disappear?"

But in the case of him who has just passed from us, we have the

satisfaction of knowing that his life-work has been well and faithfully

done, and that he leaves behind him only friends.

DANVERS, 6th Month, 18, 1886.

HISTORICAL PAPERS

DANIEL O'CONNELL.

In February, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a speech in the United

States Senate, which was intended to smooth away the difficulties

which his moderate opposition to the encroachments of slavery had

erected in his path to the presidency. His calumniation of

O'Connell called out the following summary of the career of the

great Irish patriot. It was published originally in the

Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadelphia, April 25, 1839.

Perhaps the most unlucky portion of the unlucky speech of Henry Clay on

the slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up to

scorn and contempt the great Liberator of Ireland. We say an attempt,

for who will say it has succeeded? Who feels contempt for O'Connell?

Surely not the slaveholder? From Henry Clay, surrounded by his slave-

gang at Ashland, to the most miserable and squalid slave-driver and small

breeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the name

of O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear and

hate the eloquent Irishman. But their contempt, forsooth! Talk of the

sheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears to

the pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!

After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing the

advertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--

"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt down

and proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of that

entire section. Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognize

in the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States at

the Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked to

take of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better have

consulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating him

with contemptuous silence. He would exclude us from European society, he

who himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received with

scornful repugnance into it! If he be no more desirous of our society

than we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-

intercourse will exist between us. Yes, sir, I think the American

Minister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity by

regarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons as

the malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and the

libeller of a foreign and kindred people."

The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones of

congratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skill

and dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolved

himself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke of

policy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of the

Union. But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to these

premature rejoicings. "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irish

agitator has been made use of against us with no small success," say the

New York papers. "They failed," says the Daily Evening Star, "to

convince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of his

country,' or that there was an excuse for thus denouncing him."

The defeat of the Whigs of New York and the cause of it have excited no

small degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator. In

this city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to the

aid of Henry Clay,--

"A tom-tit twittering on an eagle's back."

The learned editor gives it as his opinion that Daniel O'Connell is a

"political beggar," a "disorganizing apostate;" talks in its pretty way

of the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice," etc.; and

finally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assures

us that "his weakness of mind is almost beyond calculation!"

We have heard it rumored during the past week, among some of the self-

constituted organs of the Clay party in this city, that at a late meeting

in Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, and

publish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and so

much of the latter's speeches and writings as relate to American slavery,

for the purpose of convincing the countrymen of O'Connell of the justice,

propriety, and, in view of the aggravated circumstances of the case,

moderation and forbearance of Henry Clay when speaking of a man who has

had the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" of

our country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginia

slave-traders.

We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagacious

committee. We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals to

the sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished. We

should like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interests

and welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of this

publication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblest

champion.

But who is Daniel O'Connell? "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!" say the

Tory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe and

apprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he is

wielding,--a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate of

Europe. "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission into

European society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--

a man whose "wind should be stopped," say the American slaveholders, and

their apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the Philadelphia

Gazette, and the Democratic Whig Association.

But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the world

will do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more for

human liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own

oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and

purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened

by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British

colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will be

remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of

Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,

detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall

have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and

Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of

slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who

in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned

against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an

egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world

which God and nature are urging forward."

The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated

in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the

plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that

wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of

feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the

untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the

development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause

of liberty and the welfare of man.

The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his

native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England

and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a

new era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriot

has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of

his country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, however

pure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth was

yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of

freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--the

relic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument of

despotism--a game

"which, were their subjects wise,

Kings would not play at."

But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed

against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the

united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over

prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy

where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of

man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by

weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.

Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this

triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of

political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of

the strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic of

Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for

the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The Catholic

Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by

their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield

submissively to the supremacy of the people.

(The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political

unions." In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq., at

the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the

following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the

Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and

father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell.")

Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations to

their centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were

effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in

motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to

every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the

disturbed centre of a lake.

The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in this

country. Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholic

religion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against its

conscientious followers. The cruel persecutions of the dissenters from

the Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors of

the Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simple

dwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocities

peculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessary

consequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon the

constitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveous

disabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacy

or power.

Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies should

thus be overlooked,--the undeniable truth that religious bigotry and

intolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted of

one century have been the persecutors of another. In our own country,

it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in New

England the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on pain

of death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in Catholic

Maryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty of

conscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietly

through the same streets to their respective altars.

At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found the

people of Ireland divided into three great classes,--the Protestant or

Church party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church party

constituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possession

the government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland,

controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy,

magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country,

holding their property and power by the favor of England, and

consequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probably

twice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade and

manufactures,--sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in

feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic

brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the

Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and

almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion

of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of

landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly has

a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as

"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons

to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There was

no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or

religious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them."

The following facts relative to the disabilities under which the

Catholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of

1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of those

laws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland upon

the necks of the remainder.

A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholic

commoner in the House of Commons. A Catholic could not be Lord

Chancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master or

Keeper of the Rolls; Justice of the King's Bench or of the Common Pleas;

Baron of the Exchequer; Attorney or Solicitor General; King's Sergeant at

Law; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman of

Sessions for the County of Dublin. He could not be the Recorder of a

city or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county,

city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or other

governor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; Privy

Councillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary

of State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the Privy

Seal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor Lord

Mayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a member

of a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for the

maintenance of a clergyman, or for the support of a chapel or a school;

and in corporate towns he was excluded from the grand juries.

O'Connell commenced his labors for emancipation with the strong

conviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish people

could overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union of

action could only be obtained by the establishment of something like

equality between the different religious parties. Discarding all other

than peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placed

himself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressive

laws. Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddened

spirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldiery

found no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, the

Catholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pure

and peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration. His

influence was felt in all parts of the island. Wherever an unlawful

association existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once to

detect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch its

deluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies. In his presence

the Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irish

clansman forgot his feuds. He taught the party in power, and who

trembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could only

be obtained by justice and kindness. He entreated his oppressed Catholic

brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands

to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too

humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of

wrong.

The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood

thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the

darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and

steadily from all its ancient altars. Shoulder to shoulder gathered

around him the patriot spirits of his nation,--men unbribed by the golden

spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer

and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator,

wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion

of Catholic and Protestant,--the sash of blended orange and green, soiled

and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins,

and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the

droppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty and

resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory

struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its

fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action,

until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at once

from the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed back

from Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung from

the reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his native

land, at once its disgrace and glory,--the conqueror of Napoleon; and, in

the words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from around

him, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistible

genius of Universal Emancipation.

On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took his

seat in the British Parliament. The eyes of millions were upon him.

Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed her

confidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names and

brilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long and

dark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold and

British patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irish

pride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms against

their sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hung

with breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last great

champion was subjected.

The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.

The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled

magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among

the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat

in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the

Kerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the first

occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded

justice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his hand

to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his

heart was with it.

Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the

redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great

measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed

not a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his first

efforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harsh

avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery

luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland

suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;

the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what

they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to

London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and

patriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry,

the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union,

became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British

Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been

feared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers of

derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that

very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan

failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken

down.

No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a

greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of

colonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured

forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of

pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on

the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the

slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered

into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the

shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He

did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had

grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to

be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated." He left Sir Robert

Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests

of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood,

building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and

spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding

sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as

well as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy

that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be

acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would,

he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what cast

or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political,

intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. He

was for justice,--justice in the name of humanity and according to the

righteous law of the living God.

Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to our

glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his

own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted

no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiastic

admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should

have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of

slavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever man

has been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has been

directed: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancient

liberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing the

foot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; and

last, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, and

dragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadly

embrace of her oppressor. American slavery but shares in his common

denunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pity

for the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down.

In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of

that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed

Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain

the sense of the people." It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's

indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted

out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The Irish

Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the

United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. It

diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and

cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it

established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to

corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threw

no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has

O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange

ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity

on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. (Letters to the

Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.)

In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated

_Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain_. Like Tallien, before the

French convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had only

partially lifted. He held up before the people of Great Britain the new

indignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland's

wrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, for

redress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of his

country's defiance and scorn. There is a fine burst of indignant Irish

feeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:--

"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by this

Reform Bill. My letters are long before the public. They have been

unrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details. And with this case of

atrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of Great

Britain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive? Why, I have got

some half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and political

characters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestir

themselves in our behalf!

"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or be

silent. I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor of

the Irish. You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity,

unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine.

"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not,

I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained

freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken

off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its

folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself

justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British

neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor

any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by

peaceable and legal means."

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, had

prepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of the

people. Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neck

peaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke. From the Canon of Cashel, prepared

by English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first time

that tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, the

Church in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law,

and literally reaped its tithes with the sword. The decree of the Dublin

Synod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within the

pale of the English settlement. The attempts of Henry VIII. also failed.

Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by stern

opposition. And although from the time of William III. the tithe system

has been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regarded

otherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of the

people. An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder,

not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long endured

by any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen. Tithes

to the amount of L1,000,000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland,

in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of her

population as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, from

the Catholic counties. (See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G.

Stanley.) In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabited

by the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to the

tithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coat

even on the poor man's back. (Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq., at an anti-

tithe meeting.) The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the Irish

Church Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140,000; Derry

L120,000; Kilmore L100,000; Clogher L100,000; Waterford L70,000. Compare

these enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of the

Church, namely L270,000. Yet that Church has 2,000,000 souls under its

care, while that of Ireland has not above 500,000. Nor are these

princely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors. The bishoprics

of Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees,--by men who know no

more of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West India

plantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless

labor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymen

in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in

Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the

wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by

the bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of

Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous

priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false

zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true

religion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to

their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar,--they stand on

the altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear of

princes, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; a

faction against their king when they are not his slaves,--ever the dirt

under his feet or a poniard to his heart."

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthy

landholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries of

life, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions of

a domestic parliament. In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such a

parliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the national

industry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starving

amid the ruins of deserted manufactories. During the brief period of

partial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, the

manufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile of

contented industry was visible all over the land. In 1797 there were

15,000 silk-weavers in the city of Dublin alone. There are now but 400.

Such is the practical effect of the Union, of that suicidal act of the

Irish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror the

dearest interests of the country to the legislation of an English

Parliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh,--of that Castlereagh

who, when accused by Grattan of spending L15,000 in purchasing votes for

the Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "We

did spend L15,000, and we would have spent L15,000,000 if necessary to

carry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707,000 Irishmen petitioned

against the Union and 300,000 for it, maintained that the latter

constituted the majority! Well has it been said that the deep vengeance

which Ireland owed him was inflicted by the great criminal upon himself.

The nation which he sold and plundered saw him make with his own hand the

fearful retribution. The great body of the Irish people never assented

to the Union. The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr.)

Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were made

use of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children,

to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland had

been left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitation

have rejected the resolutions. Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuously

opposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; some

of them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground in

Ireland, and completely dependent on government." "Let us reflect upon

the arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament to

pack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons. All persons holding

offices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, were

stripped of all their employments. A bill framed for preserving the

purity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats were

vacated by their holders having received nominal offices."

The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the Irish

Liberator. The tremendous power of the English political unions is

beginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland. A deep sympathy is

evinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse her

cause. Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation of

the question of her rights and interests. The spirit of the age forbids

it. The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to use

the words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, and

gazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of her

bulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of the

very waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God's

own creation. Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell,--a

victory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of human

blood, unmoistened by a solitary tear.

Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal of

the Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in the

government and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repeal

unnecessary and impolitic.

The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting his

object of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appeals

to the people. In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin Trades

Union, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained with

blood. Far indeed from it. We can, and ought to, carry the repeal only

in the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in the

sight of God. The best revolution which was ever effected could not be

worth one drop of human blood." In his speech at the public dinner given

him by--the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal of

pacific principles. "It may be stated," said he, "to countervail our

efforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life and

property; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and give

an undue and fearful influence to one rank to the ruin of all others.

These are awful considerations, truly, if risked. I am one of those who

have always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased by

a single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructure

based upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric,--beautiful in

the brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches the

arid basis melting away in wreck and ruin! I am an accountable being; I

have a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for my

thoughts and actions in this. I disclaim here any act of mine which

would sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration of

our social condition which must be purchased by their blood. And here,

in the face of God and of our common country, I protest that if I did not

sincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could be

effected without violence, without any change in the relative scale of

ranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that change

which all must desire, making each better than it was before, and

cementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up the

struggle which I have always kept with tyranny. I would withdraw from

the contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuate

our thraldom. I would not for one moment dare to venture for that which

in costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear. But it will

cost no such price. Have we not had within my memory two great political

revolutions? And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to the

social compact? Have we not arrived at a period when physical force and

military power yield to moral and intellectual energy. Has not the time

of 'Cedant arma togae' come for us and the other nations of the earth?"

Let us trust that the prediction of O'Connell will be verified; that

reason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nations

of the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrifice

of a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish. Glorious beyond

all others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up against

nation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgment

of the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individual

to drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personal

prejudice and passion. The reformed governments of Great Britain and

France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to

this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike

ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of

peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.

Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widely

dissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell. The one smote down the

modern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of his

reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark

with the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truth

and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a

peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may

be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol

of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the

beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its

votaries. The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimity

with none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of the

former. To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rouse

the better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of.

assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice to

the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt,

and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped

of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,--

these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened the

earth with carnage:--

"They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch,

And courage tempered with a holier fire."

Of the more recent efforts of O'Connell we need not speak, for no one can

read the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O'Connell

is, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of the

British empire. Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mind

against him by a republication on this side of the water of the false and

foul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the

"O'Connell rent," a sum placed annually in his hands by a grateful

people, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object of

Ireland's political redemption. He has acquired no riches by his

political efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have been

directed to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom.

For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of every

son of Ireland. One million of ransomed slaves in the British

dependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O'Connell

with that of Wilberforce and Clarkson. And when the stain and caste of

slavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded as

our friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings and

eloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across the

Atlantic, touched the guilty sensitiveness of the national conscience,

and through shame prepared the way for repentance.

ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.

A review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's _History of England

from the Accession of James II_.

In accordance with the labor-saving spirit of the age, we have in these

volumes an admirable example of history made easy. Had they been

published in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of the

poet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofa

and read eternal new romances."

The style is that which lends such a charm to the author's essays,--

brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the

work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling

rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer.

A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in

saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts

and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his

epigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox than

the sober guise of truth. The intelligent and well-informed reader of

the volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse the

decisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, or

class from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of his

ridicule. There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for in

a narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of the

book pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of the

actual realities of which it treats as would be desirable. We cannot

help feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous in

avoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names,

and statistics. The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality of

the reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with one

remarkable exception, the _History of England_ might be divided into

papers of magazine length, and published, without any violence to

propriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department of

literature in which he confessedly stands without a rival,--historical

review.

That exception is, however, no unimportant one. In our view, it is the

crowning excellence of the first volume,--its distinctive feature and

principal attraction. We refer to the third chapter of the volume, from

page 260 to page 398,--the description of the condition of England at the

period of the accession of James II. We know of nothing like it in the

entire range of historical literature. The veil is lifted up from the

England of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial,

social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passes

before us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers,

rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fare

to clerical dependents,--rough roads, serviceable only for horseback

travelling,--towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal,

--and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming with

vermin,--we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents to

the England of our day. We no longer sigh for "the good old days." The

most confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things now

are, they were far worse a few generations back. Macaulay, in this

elaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service to

humanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholy

notion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence the

cant of blind, unreasoning conservatism.

In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at from

five millions to five millions five hundred thousand. Of the eight

hundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twice

a week. The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than

once a week. Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of the

comparatively wealthy. Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vast

majority. The average wages of workingmen was at least one half less

than is paid in England for the same service at the present day. One

fifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief.

Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear. Education was almost unknown

to the vast majority. The houses and shops were not numbered in the

cities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read. The

shopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs and

graven images. Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better than

modern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village. The country

magistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar for

a modern tap-room. Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in the

lowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity. The poets of the time, from

Dryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness. The most

shameless indecency polluted their pages. The theatre and the brothel

were in strict unison. The Church winked at the vice which opposed

itself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism. The superior

clergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; the

inferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires and

knights of the shire. The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held the

most unenviable position. "If he was permitted to dine with the family,

he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill

himself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts and

cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof

till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part

of which he had been excluded."

Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a state

of barbarism. The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting

freebooters. The farm-houses were fortified and guarded. So dangerous

was the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills.

Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard of

armed men.