bony hand snatches back a performer in the midst of his part, and him, whom yesterday two infinities (past and future) would not suffice, a handful of dust is enough to cover and silence forever. Nay, we see the same fleshless fingers opening to clutch the showman himself, and guess, not without a shudder, that they are lying in wait for spectator also.

puto; I am curious about even John Smith. The desire next in strength to this (an opposite pole, indeed, of the same magnet) is that of communicating the unintelligence we have carefully picked up.

Men in general may be divided into the inquisitive and the communicative. To the first class belong Peeping Toms, eaves-drop

"Think of it: for three dollars a year I buypers, navel-contemplating Brahmins, metaphya season-ticket to this great Globe Theatre, for which God would write the dramas (only that we like farces, spectacles, and the tragedies of Apollyon better), whose scene-shifter is Time, and whose curtain is rung down by Death.

sicians, travellers, Empedocleses, spies, the various societies for promoting Rhinothism, Columbuses, Yankees, discoverers, and men of science, who present themselves to the mind as so many marks of interrogation wandering up "Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes and down the world, or sitting in studies and as I am tearing off the wrapper of my news-laboratories. The second class I should again paper. Then suddenly that otherwise too often subdivide into four. In the first subdivision vacant sheet becomes invested for me with a I would rank those who have an itch to tell strange kind of awe. Look! deaths and mar- us about themselves, - as keepers of diaries, riages, notices of inventions, discoveries, and insignificant persons generally, Montaignes, books, lists of promotions, of killed, wounded, Horace Walpoles, autobiographers, poets. The and missing, news of fires, accidents, of sudden second includes those who are anxious to imwealth and as sudden poverty:- I hold in my part information concerning other people, — as hand the ends of myriad invisible electric con- historians, barbers, and such. To the third beductors, along which tremble the joys, sorrows, long those who labor to give us intelligence wrongs, triumphs, hopes, and despairs of as about nothing at all, - as novelists, political many men and women everywhere. So that orators, the large majority of authors, preachupon that mood of mind which seems to isolate ers, lecturers, and the like. In the fourth me from mankind as a spectator of their pup- come those who are communicative from mopet-pranks, another supervenes, in which I tives of public benevolence, as finders of feel that I, too, unknown and unheard of, am mares'-nests and bringers of ill news. Each of yet of some import to my fellows. For, through us two-legged fowls without feathers embraces my newspaper here, do not families take pains all these subdivisions in himself to a greater or to send ine, an entire stranger, news of a death less degree, for none of us so much as lays an among them? Are not here two who would egg, or incubates a chalk one, but straightway have me know of their marriage? And, stran- the whole barnyard shall know it by our cackle gest of all, is not this singular person anxious to or our cluck. Omnibus hoc vitium est. There have me informed that he has received a fresh are different grades in all these classes. One supply of Dimitry Bruisgins? But to none of will turn his telescope toward a back-yard, us does the Present continue miraculous (even another toward Uranus; one will tell you that if for a moment discerned as such). We glance he dined with Smith, another that he supped carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to with Plato. In one particular, all men may be Orion and the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, considered as belonging to the first grand divisand to-morrow this sheet (Acts x. 11, 12), in ion, inasmuch as they all seem equally desirwhich a vision was let down to me from Heaven, ous of discovering the mote in their neighbor's shall be the wrappage to a bar of soap or the eye. platter for a beggar's broken victuals."-H. W.]

No. VII.

A LETTER

FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY
IN ANSWER TO SUTTIN QUESTIONS PRO-
POSED BY MR. HOSEA BIGLOW, INCLOSED
IN A NOTE FROM MR. BIGLOW TO S H.
GAY, ESQ., EDITOR OF THE NATIONAL
ANTISLAVERY STANDARD.

[CURIOSITY may be said to be the quality which pre-eminently distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals. As we trace the scale of animated nature downward, we find this faculty (as it may truly be called) of the mind diminished in the savage, and wellnigh extinct in the brute. The first object which civilized man proposes to himself I take to be the finding out whatsoever he can concerning his neighbors. Nihil humanum a me alienum

To one or another of these species every human being may safely be referred. I think it beyond a peradventure that Jonah prosecuted some inquiries into the digestive apparatus of whales, and that Noah sealed up a letter in an empty bottle, that news in regard to him might not be wanting in case of the worst. They had else been super or subter human. I conceive, also, that, as there are certain persons who continually peep and pry at the keyhole of that mysterious door through which, sooner or later, we all make our exits, so there are doubtless ghosts fidgeting and fretting on the other side of it, because they have no means of conveying back to this world the scraps of news they have picked up in that. For there is an answer ready somewhere to every question, the great law of give and take runs through all nature, and if we see a hook, we may be sure that an eye is waiting for it. I read in every face I meet a standing advertisement of information wanted in regard to A. B., or that the friends of C. D. can hear something to his disadvantage by application to such a one.

It was to gratify the two great passions of asking and answering that epistolary correspondence was first invented. Letters (for by

It is a nose thet wunt be led.

this usurped title epistles are now commonly | An ef I've one pecooler feetur,
known) are of several kinds. First, there are
those which are not letters at all, -as letters-
patent, letters dimissory, letters enclosing
bills, letters of administration, Pliny's letters,
letters of diplomacy, of Cato, of Mentor, of
Lords Lyttelton, Chesterfield, and Orrery, of

Jacob Behmen, Seneca (whom St. Jerome in

cludes in his list of sacred writers), letters from abroad, from sous in college to their fathers, letters of marque, and letters generally, which are in no wise letters of mark. Second, are real letters, such as those of Gray, Cowper, Walpole, Howell, Lamb, D. Y., the first letters from children (printed in staggering capitals),

Letters from New York, letters of credit, and others, interesting for the sake of the writer or the thing written. I have read also letters from Europe by a gentleman named Pinto, containing some curious gossip, and which I hope to see collected for the benefit of the curious.

So, to begin at the beginnin'
An' come direcly to the pint,
I think the country 's underpinnin'
Is some consid❜ble out o' jint;
I aint agoin' to try your patience
By tellin' who done this or thet,
I don't make no insinooations,
I jest let on I smell a rat.

Thet is, I mean, it seems to me so,
But, ef the public think I 'm wrong,
I wunt deny but wut I be so,-
An', fact, it don't smell very strong;
My mind 's tu fair to lose its balance
An' say wich party hez most sense;
There may be folks o' greater talence
Thet can't set stiddier on the fence.

There are, besides, letters addressed to pos-
terity, -as epitaphs, for example, written for
their own monuments by monarchs, whereby
we have lately become possessed of the names
of several great conquerors and kings of kings,
hitherto unheard of and still unpronounceable,
but valuable to the student of the entirely dark
ages. The letter of our saviour to King Abga-
rus, that which St. Peter sent to King Pepin in
the year of grace 755, that of the Virgin to the
magistrates of Messina, that of the Sanhedrim
of Toledo to Annas and Caiaphas, A. D. 35, that
of Galeazzo Sforza's spirit to his brother Lodo-
vico, that of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus to the
D-1, and that of this last-mentioned active I stan' upon the Constitution,
police-magistrate to a nun of Girgenti, I would
place in a class by themselves, as also the letters
of candidates, concerning which I shall dilate
more fully in a note at the end of the following
poem. At present, sat prata biberunt. Only,
concerning the shape of letters, they are all
either square or oblong, to which general figures
circular letters and round-robins also conform
themselves. II. W.]

I'm an eclectic; ez to choosin'
'Twixt this an' thet, I'm plaguy
lawth;

DEER SIR its gut to be the fashun now to rite letters to the candid 8s and i wus chose at a publick Meetin in Jaalam to du wut wus nessary fur that town. i writ to 271 ginerals and gut ansers to 209. tha air called candid Ss but I don't see nothin candid about 'em. this here 1 wich I send wus thought satty's factory. I dunno as it's ushle to print Poscrips, but as all the ansers I got hed the saim, I sposed it wus best. times has gretly changed. Formaly to knock a man into a cocked hat wus to use him up, but now it ony gives him a chance fur the cheef madgustracy. H. B.

I leave a side thet looks like losin',
But (wile there 's doubt) I stick to
both;

Ez preudunt statesmun say, who 've
planned

A way to git the most profusion
O' chances ez to ware they 'll stand.

Ez fer the war, I go agin it,

----

I mean to say I kind o' du,
Thet is, I mean thet, bein' in it,

The best way wuz to fight it thru ;
Not but wut abstract war is horrid,
I sign to thet with all my heart, -
But civlyzation doos git forrid

Sometimes upon a powder-cart.

About thet darned Proviso matter
I never hed a grain o' doubt,
Nor I aint one my sense to scatter

So 'st no one could n't pick it out; My love fer North an' South is equil,

So I'll jest answer plump an' frank, No matter wut may be the sequil,

Yes, Sir, I am agin a Bank.

Ez to the answerin' o' questions,
I'm an off ox at bein' druv,
Though I aint one thet ary test shuns
'll give our folks a helpin' shove ;
Kind o' permiscoous I go it

Fer the holl country, an' the ground

then preceptor of our academy, and in other particulars a very deserving and sensible young man, though possessing a somewhat limited knowledge of the Greek tongue. But his heresy struck down no deep root, and, he having been lately removed by the hand of Providence, I had the satisfaction of reaffirming my cherished sentiments in a sermon preached upon the Lord's day immediately succeeding his funeral. This might seem like taking an unfair advantage, did I not add that he had made provision in his last will (being celibate) for the publication of a posthumous tracRate in support of his own dangerous opinions. I know of nothing in our modern times which approaches so nearly to the ancient oracle as the letter of a Presidential candidate. Now, among the Greeks, the eating of beans was strictly forbidden to all such as had it in mind to consult those expert amphibologists, and this same prohibition on the part of Pythag oras to his disciples is understood to imply an abstinence from politics, beans having been used as ballots. That other explication, quod videlicet sensus eo cibo obtundi existimaret, though supported pugnis et calcibus by many of the learned, and not wanting the countenance of Cicero, is confuted by the larger experience of New England. On the whole, I think it safer to apply here the rule of interpretation which now generally obtains in regard to antique cosmogonies, myths, fables, proverbial expressions, and knotty points generally, which is, to find a common-sense meaning, and then select whatever can be imagined the most opposite thereto. In this way we arrive at the conclusion, that the Greeks objected to the questioning of candidates. And very properly, if, as I conceive, the chief point be not to discover what a person in that position is, or what he will do, but whether he can be elected. Vos exemplaria Græca nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.

style so compressed that superfinous words may not be detected in it. A severe critic might curtail that famous brevity of Caesar's by two thirds, drawing his pen through the supererogatory veni and vidi. Perhaps, after all, the surest footing of hope is to be found in the rapidly increasing tendency to demand less and less of qualification in candidates. Already have statesmanship, experience, and the possession (nay, the profession, even) of principles been rejected as superfluous, and may not the patriot reasonably hope that the ability to write will follow? At present, there may be death in pot-hooks as well as pots, the loop of a letter may suffice for a bow-string, and all the dreadful heresies of Antislavery may lurk in a flourish. —H. W.]

NO. VIII.

A SECOND LETTER FROM B. SAWIN, ESQ.

[IN the following epistle, we behold Mr. Sawin returning, a miles emeritus, to the bosom of his family. Quantum mutatus! The good Father of us all had doubtless intrusted to the keeping of this child of his certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put in him a share of that vital force, the nicest economy of every minute atom of which is necessary to the perfect development of Humanity. He had given him a brain and heart, and so had equipped his soul with the two strong wings of knowledge and love, whereby it can mount to hang its nest under the eaves of heaven. And this child, so dowered, he had intrusted to the keeping of his vicar, the State. How stands the account of that stewardship? The State, or Society (call her by what name you will), But, since an imitation of the Greeks in had taken no manner of tho ht of him till she this particular (the asking of questions being saw him swept out into the street, the pitiful one chief privilege of freemen) is hardly to be leavings of last night's debauch, with cigarhoped for, and our candidates will answer, ends, lemon-parings, tobacco-quids, slops, vile whether they are questioned or not, I would stenches, and the whole loathsome next-mornrecommend that these ante-electionary dia- ing of the bar-room, an own child of the logues should be carried on by symbols, as Almighty God! I remember him as he was were the diplomatic correspondences of the brought to be christened, a ruddy, rugged Scythians and Macrobii, or confined to the lan- babe; and now there he wallows, reeking, guage of signs, like the famous interview of seething,- the dead corpse, not of a man, but Panurge and Goatsnose. A candidate might of a soul, -a putrefying lump, horrible for the then convey a suitable reply to all committees life that is in it. Comes the wind of heaven, of inquiry by closing one eye, or by presenting that good Samaritan, and parts the hair upon them with a phial of Egyptian darkness to be his forehead, nor is too nice to kiss those speculated upon by their respective constituen- parched, cracked lips; the morning opens upon cies. These answers would be susceptible of him her eyes full of pitying sunshine, the sky whatever retrospective construction the exi- yearns down to him, -and there he lies fergencies of the political campaign might seem menting. O sleep! let me not profane thy holy to demand, and the candidate could take his name by calling that stertorous unconsciousposition on either side of the fence with entire ness a slumber! By and by comes along the consistency. Or, if letters must be written, State, God's vicar. Does she say, My poor, profitable use might be made of the Dighton forlorn foster-child! Behold here a force rock hieroglyphic or the cuneiform script, which I will make dig and plant and build for every fresh decipherer of which is enabled to me"? Not so, but, -"Here is a recruit readyeduce a different meaning, whereby a sculp-made to my hand, a piece of destroying energy tured stone or two supplies us, and will probably continue to supply posterity, with a very vast and various body of authentic history For even the briefest epistle in the ordinary chirography is dangerous. There is scarce any

lying unprofitably idle." So she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to do duty as a destroyer.

I made one of the crowd at the last Mechan