"Ner never paid no demmiges; but | Razor an' soap-brush intu, with his thet wun't do no harm, Pervidin' thet you'll ondertake to oversee the farm; (My eldes' boy he's so took up, wut with the Ringtail Rangers An' settin' in the Jestice-Court for welcomin' o' strangers";) [He sot on me ;] "an' so, ef you'll jest ondertake the care She hed another motive, tu: I mention of it here T'encourage lads thet 's growin' up to study 'n' persevere, An' show 'em how much better 't pays to mind their winter-schoolin' Than to go off on benders 'n' sech, an' waste their time in foolin'; Ef 't warn't for studyin' evenins, why, I never 'd ha' ben here An orn'ment o' saciety, in my approprut spear: She wanted somebody, ye see, o' taste hymbook an' his Bible, But they du preach, I swan to man, it's puf'kly indescrib'le! They go it like an Ericsson's ten-hosspower coleric ingine, An' make Ole Split-Foot winch an' squirm, for all he's used to singein' Hawkins's whetstone ain't a pinch o' primin' to the innards To hearin' on 'em put free grace t' a lot o' tough old sinhards! But I must eend this letter now: 'fore long I'll send a fresh un; I 've lots o' things to write about, perticklerly Seceshun: I'm called off now to mission-work, to let a leetle law in To Cynthy's hide: an' so, till death, BIRDOFREDUM SAWIN. No. II. MASON AND SLIDELL: A YANKEE IDYLL. TO THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. JAALAM, 6th Jan., 1862. GENTLEMEN, the insertion of a portion of my letter in I was highly gratified by the last number of your valuable and entertaining Miscellany, though in a type which rendered its substance inaccessible even to the beautiful new spectacles presented to me by a Committee of the Parish on New Year's Day. I trust that I was able to bear your very considerable abridgment of my lucubrations with a spirit becoming a Christian. My third granddaughI have trained to read slowly and with ter, Rebekah, aged fourteen years, and whom proper emphasis (a practice too much neglected in our modern systems of education), read aloud to me the excellent essay upon "Old Age," the authour of which I cannot help suspecting to be a young man who has never yet known what it was to have snow (canities morosa) upon his own roof. Dissolve frigus, large super foco ligna reponens, is a rule for the young, whose lenitives. A good life behind him is the wood-pile is yet abundant for such cheerful best thing to keep an old man's shoulders from shivering at every breath of sorrow or ill-fortune. But meti mks it were easier for an old man to feel the disadvantages of youth than the advantages of age. Of these latter I reckon one of the chiefest to be this that we attach a less inordinate value to our own productions, and, distrusting daily more and more our own wisdom (with the conceit whereof at twenty we wrap ourselves away from knowledge as with a garment), do reconcile ourselves with the wisdom of God. I could have wished, indeed, that room might have been made for the residue of the anecdote relating to Deacon Tinkham, which would not only have gratified a natural curiosity on the part of the publick (as I have reason to know from several letters of inquiry already received), but would also, as I think, have largely in creased the circulation of your Magazine in this town. Nihil humani alienum, there is a curiosity about the affairs of our neigh. bors which is not only pardonable, but even commendable. But I shall abide a more fitting season. "But nowadays the Bridge ain't wut they So much ez Em'son, Hawthorne, an' Thoreau. gave the first hint. I reminded my talented young parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the edacious tooth of Time. But he answered me to this effect: that there was no greater mistake of an authour than to suppose the reader had no fancy of his own; that, if once that faculty was to be called into activity, it were better to be in for the whole sheep than the shoulder; and that he knew Concord like a book, an expression questionable in propriety, since there are few things with which he is not more familiar than with the printed page. In proof of what he affirmed, he showed me some verses which with others he had stricken out as too much delaying the action, but which I communicate in this place because they rightly define "punkin-seed" (which Mr. Bartlett would have a kind of perch, - -a creature to which I have found a rod or pole not to be so easily equivalent in our inland waters as in the books of arithmetic), and because As touching the following literary effort it conveys an eulogium on the worthy son of Esquire Biglow, much might be profita- of an excellent father, with whose acquaintbly said on the topick of Idyllick and Pas-ance (eheu, fugaces anni !) I was formerly toral Poetry, and concerning the proper honoured. distinctions to be made between them, from Theocritus, the inventor of the former, to Collins, the latest authour I know of who has emulated the classicks in the latter style. But in the time of a Civil War worthy a Milton to defend and a Lucan to sing, it may be reasonably doubted whether the publick, never too studious of serious instruction, might not consider other objects more deserving of present attention. Concerning the title of Idyll, which Mr. Biglow has adopted at my suggestion, it may not be improper to animadvert, that the name properly signifies a poem somewhat rustick in phrase (for, though the learned are not agreed as to the particular dialect employed by Theocritus, they are universanimous both as to its rusticity and its capacity of rising now and then to the level of more elevated sentiments and expressions), while it is also descriptive of real scenery and manners. Yet it must be admitted that the production now in question (which here and there bears perhaps too plainly the marks of my correcting hand) does partake of the nature of a Pastoral, inasmuch as the interlocutors therein are purely imaginary beings, and the whole is little better than KaпVοÛ σKιas ŏvap. The plot was, as I believe, suggested by the "Twa Briggs" of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the last century, as that found its prototype in the "Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey" by Fergusson, though the metre of this latter be different by a foot in each verse. Perhaps the Two Dogs of Cervantes once A-schoolin', 'cause to home I played the An' I've ben sence a-visitin' the Jedge, sense Than there is mosses on an ole stone fence." Concerning the subject-matter of the verses, I have not the leisure at present to write so fully as I could wish, my time being occupied with the preparation of a discourse for the forthcoming bi-centenary celebration of the first settlement of Jaalam East Parish. It may gratify the publick interest to mention the circumstance, that my investigations to this end have enabled me to verify the fact (of much historick importance, and hitherto hotly debated) that Shearjashub Tarbox was the first child of white parentage horn in this town, being named in his father's will under date August 7th, or 9th, 1662. It is well known that those who advocate the claims of Mehetable Goings are unable to find any trace of her existence prior to October of that year. As respects the settlement of the Masou and Slidell question, Mr. Biglow has not incorrectly stated the popular sentiment, so far as I can judge by its expression in this locality. For myself, I feel more sorrow than resentment: for I am old enough to have heard those talk of England who still, even after the unhappy estrangement, could not unschool their lips from calling her the Mother-Country. But England has insisted on ripping up old wounds, and has undone the healing work of fifty years; for nations do not reason, they only feel, and the spretæ injuria forma rankles in their minds as bitterly as in that of a woman. And because this is so, I feel the more satisfaction that our Government has acted (as all Governments should, standing as they do between the people and their passions) as if it had arrived at years of discretion. There are three short and simple words, the hardest of all to pronounce in any language (and I suspect they were no easier before the confusion of tongues), but which no man or nation that cannot utter can claim to have arrived at manhood. Those words are, I was wrong; and I am proud that, while England played the boy, our rulers had strength enough from the People below and wisdom enough from God above to quit themselves like men. The sore points on both sides have been skilfully exasperated by interested and unscrupulous persons, who saw in a war between the two countries the only hope of profitable return for their investment in Confederate stock, whether political or financial. The always supercilious, often insulting, and sometimes even brutal tone of British journals and publick men has certainly not tended to soothe whatever resentment might exist in America. "Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me down stairs?" We have no reason to complain that England, as a necessary consequence of her clubs, has become a great society for the minding of other people's business, and we can smile good-naturedly when she lectures other nations on the sins of arrogance and conceit; but we may justly consider it a breach of the political convenances which are expected to regulate the intercourse of one well-bred government with another, when men holding places in the ministry allow themselves to dictate our domestic policy, to instruct us in our duty, and to stigmatize as unholy a war for the rescue of whatever a high-minded people should hold most vital and most sacred. Was it in good taste, that I may use the mildest term, for Earl Russell to expound our own Constitution to President Lincolu, or to make a new and fallacious application of an old phrase for our benefit, and tell us that the Rebels were fighting for independence and we for empire? As if all wars for independence were by nature just and deserving of sympathy, and all wars for empire ignoble and worthy only of reprobation, or as if these easy phrases in any way characterized this terrible struggle, terrible not so truly in any superficial sense, as from the essential and deadly enmity of the principles that underlie it. His Lordship's bit of borrowed rhetoric would justify Smith O'Brien, Nana Sahib, and the Maori chieftains, while it would condemn nearly every war in which England has ever been engaged. Was it so very presumptuous in us to think that it would be decorous in English statesmen if they spared time enough to acquire some kind of knowledge, though of the most elementary kind, in regard to this country and the questions at issue here, before they pronounced so off-hand a judgment? Or is political information expected to come Dogberry-fashion in England, like reading and writing, by nature? And now all respectable England is wondering at our irritability, and sees a quite satisfactory explanation of it in our national vanity. Suare mari magno, it is pleasant, sitting in the easy-chairs of Downing Street, to sprinkle pepper on the raw wounds of a kindred people struggling for life, and philosophical to find in selfconceit the cause of our instinctive resentment. Surely we were of all nations the least liable to any temptation of vanity at a time when the gravest anxiety and the keenest sorrow were never absent from our hearts. Nor is conceit the exclusive attribute of any one nation. The earliest of English travellers, Sir John Mandeville, took a less provincial view of the matter when he said, For fro what partie of the erthe that men duellen, other aboven or beneathen, it semethe alweys to hem that duellen that thei gon more righte than any other folke." The English have always had their fair share of this amiable quality. We may say of them still, as the authour of the Lettres Cabalistiques said of them more than a century ago, "Ces derniers disent naturellement qu'il n'y a qu'eux qui soient estimables." And, as he also says, "J'aimerais presque autant tomber entre les mains d'un Inquisiteur que d'un Anglois qui me fait sentir sans cesse combien il s'estime plus que moi, et qui ne daigne me parler que pour injurier ma Nation et pour m'ennuyer du récit des grandes qualités de la sienne." Of this Bull we may safely say with Horace, habet fœnum in cornu. What we felt to be especially in- | outburst of long-repressed affection we re- "Dummodo sim splendidis vestibus ornatus, which I may freely render thus :— So long as I was prosperous, I'd dinners by the dozen, Was well-bred, witty, virtuous, and everybody's may, her fancy cousin : If luck should turn, as well she is so flexile, Will virtue, cousinship, and all return with her from exile? There was nothing in all this to exasperate a philosopher, much to make him smile rather; but the earth's surface is not chiefly inhabited by philosophers, and I revive the recollection of it now in perfect good-humour, merely by way of suggesting to our ci-devant British cousins, that it would have been easier for them to hold their tongues than for us to keep our tempers under the circumstances. It is time for Englishmen to consider whether there was nothing in the spirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as ours then was, of foreign interference. Was there nothing in the indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the blood of a people already overcharged with doubt, suspicion, and terrible responsibility? The laity in any country do not stop to consider points of law, but they have an instinctive perception of the animus that actuates the policy of a foreign nation; and in our own case they remembered that the British authorities in Canada did not wait till diplomacy could send home to England for her slow official tinder-box to fire the "Caroline." Add to this, what every sensible American knew, that the moral support of England was equal to an army of two hundred thousand The English Cabinet made a blunder, men to the Rebels, while it insured us an unquestionably, in taking it so hastily for other year or two of exhausting war. It granted that the United States had fallen was not so much the spite of her words forever from their position as a first-rate (though the time might have been more power, and it was natural that they should tastefully chosen) as the actual power for vent a little of their vexation on the people evil in them that we felt as a deadly wrong. whose inexplicable obstinacy in maintainPerhaps the most immediate and efficient ing freedom and order, and in resisting cause of mere irritation was the sudden degradation, was likely to convict them of and unaccountable change of manner on the their mistake. But if bearing a grudge be other side of the water. Only six months the sure mark of a small mind in the indibefore, the Prince of Wales had come over vidual, can it be a proof of high spirit in to call us cousins; and everywhere it was a nation? If the result of the present esnothing but "our American brethren," trangement between the two countries shall that great offshoot of British institutions be to make us more independent of British in the New World, so almost identical twaddle (Indomito nec dira ferens stipenwith them in laws, language, and litera-dia Tauro), so much the better; but if it ture, this last of the alliterative compli- is to make us insensible to the value of ments being so bitterly true, that perhaps British opinion in matters where it gives it will not be retracted even now. To this us the judgment of an impartial and culti enemy. This is no new inconvenience; for, under date, 3d June, 1745, General Pepperell wrote thus to Governor Shirley from Louisbourg: "What your Excellency observes of the army's being made acquainted with any plans proposed, until ready to be put in execution, has always been disagreeable to me, and I have given many cautions relating to it. But when your Excellency considers that our Coun vated outsider, if we are to shut ourselves | swift to convey useful intelligence to the out from the advantages of English culture, the loss will be ours, and not theirs. Because the door of the old homestead has been once slammed in our faces, shall we in a huff reject all future advances of conciliation, and cut ourselves foolishly off from any share in the humanizing influences of the place, with its ineffable riches of association, its heirlooms of inmemorial culture, its historic monuments, ours no less than theirs, its noble gallery of ances-cil of War consists of more than twenty tral portraits? We have only to succeed, and England will not only respect, but, for the first time, begin to understand us. And let us not, in our justifiable indignation at wanton insult, forget that England is not the England only of snobs who dread the democracy they do not comprehend, but the England of history, of heroes, statesmen, and poets, whose names are dear, and their influence as salutary to us as to her. Let us strengthen the hands of those in authority over us, and curb our own tongues, remembering that General Wait commonly proves in the end more than a match for General Headlong, and that the Good Book ascribes safety to a multitude, indeed, but not to a mob, of counsellours. Let us remember and perpend the words of Paulus Emilius to the people of Rome; that, "if they judged they could manage the war to more advantage by any other, he would willingly yield up his charge; but if they confided in him, they were not to make themselves his colleagues in his office, or raise reports, or criticise his actions, but, without talking, supply him with means and assistance necessary to the carrying on of the war; for, if they proposed to command their own commander, they would render this expedition more ridiculous than the former." (Vide Plutarchum in Vita P. E.) Let us also not forget what the same excellent authour says concerning Perseus's fear of spending money, and members, I am persuaded you will think it impossible for me to hinder it, if any of them will persist in communicating to inferior officers and soldiers what ought to be kept secret. I am informed that the Boston newspapers are filled with paragraphs from private letters relating to the expedition. Will your Excellency permit me to say I think it may be of ill consequence? Would it not be convenient, if your Excellency should forbid the Printers' inserting such news?" Verily, if tempora mutantur, we may question the et nos mutamur in illis; and if tongues be leaky, it will need all hands at the pumps to save the Ship of State. Our history dotes and repeats itself. If Sassycus (rather than Alcibiades) find a parallel in Beauregard, so Weakwash, as he is called by the brave Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, need not seek far among our own Sachems for his antitype. With respect, Your ob humble serv, I LOVE to start out arter night's begun, An' all the chores about the farm are done, The critters milked an' foddered, gates shet fast, Tools cleaned aginst to-morrer, supper past, An' Nancy darnin' by her ker'sene lamp, not permit the covetousness of Brother Jonathan to be the good fortune of Jefferson Davis. For my own part, till I am ready to admit the Comniander-in-Chief to my pulpit, I shall abstain from plan- I love, I say, to start upon a tramp, ning his battles. If courage he the sword, To shake the kinkles out o' back an' yet is patience the armour of a nation; legs, and in our desire for peace, let us never be willing to surrender the Constitution bequeathed us by fathers at least as wise as ourselves (even with Jefferson Davis to help us), and, with those degenerate Romans, tuta et presentia quam vetera et pe. riculosa malle. And not only should we bridle our own tongues, but the pens of others, which are An' kind o' rack my life off from the dregs Thet's apt to settle in the buttery-hutch of folks thet foller in one rut too much : Hard work is good an' wholesome, past all doubt; But 't ain't so, ef the mind gits tuckered out. |