That woke the morning with its voice along the Atlantic sea.

-O God! look down upon the land which thou hast loved so well,

And grant that in unbroken truth her children still may dwell;

Nor, while the grass grows on the hill and streams flow through the vale,

May they forget their fathers' faith, or in their covenant fail!

God keep the fairest, noblest land that lies beneath the sun;

"Our country, our whole country, and our country ever one!"

NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS.*

We are emphatically one people. The constant and expanding flood of emigrants from less favored lands gives in some sections a temporary, superficial diversity of customs, and even of language. Yet, as they come moved by an admiring wish to share our privileges, and a grateful respect for the nation which has made itself so prosperous, while it sets open its gates so hospitably wide, they readily adopt our usages, and soon become homogeneous with the mass through which they are distributed. Until they or their children are educated in free citizenship, they follow; but rarely, and then never successfully, attempt to lead. As the Anglo-Saxon tongue is the speech of the nation, so it is the AngloSaxon mind that rules. The sons of those who triumphed in the war of Independence have subdued the distant forest, making the wilderness to rejoice with the arts and virtues of their fathers. The patronymics borne by the most influential among them are most frequently such as are familar and honorable among us. Summon together the dwellers in any town of our older, particularly of our more northern states, and you will find that there is scarcely a state of the Union where they have not relatives. The representative in Congress from the farthest west laughs over their school-boy frolics with the representative of the farthest east. The woodsman on the Aroostook talks of his brother on the Rio Grande, the tradesman in the seaport, of his son, a judge, in Missouri. The true-hearted girl, who has left her mountain birth-place to earn her modest paraphernalia amidst the ponderous din of a factory near the Atlantic coast, dreams sweetly on her toil-blest pillow of him who, for her dear sake, is clearing a home in the wilds of Iowa, or sifting the sauds of some Californian Pactolus. We all claim a common history, and, whatever be our immediate parentage, are proud to own ourselves the grateful children of the mighty men who declared our country's independence, framed the bond of our Union, and bought with their sacred blood the liberties we enjoy. Nor is it an insincere compliment to assert, that, go where you will, New England is represented by the shrewdest, the most enlightened, the most successful, and the nost religious of our young population. Nearly all our teachers, with the authors of our school-books, and a very large proportion of our preachers, as well as of our editors (the classes which have the greatest control over the growing character of our youth), come from or receive their education in New England. Wherever the New Englander goes, he carries New England with him. New England Is his boast, his standard of perfection, and "So they do in New England!" his confident answer to

From the Harvard Address, "Claims of our Country on Its Literary Men."

all objectors. Great as is our reverence for those venerable men, he rather wearies us with his inexhaustible eulogy on the Pilgrim Fathers, who, he seems to think, have begotten the whole United States. Nay, enlarging upon the somewhat complacent notion of his ancestors, that God designed for them, "his chosen people," this Canaan of the aboriginal heathen, he looks upon the continent as his rightful heritage, and upon the rest of us as Hittites, Jebusites, or people of a like termination, whom he is commissioned to root out, acquiring our money, squatting on our wild lands, monopolizing our votes, and marrying our heiresses. Whence, or how justly, he derived his popular sobriquet, passes the guess of an antiquary; but certain it is, that if he meets with a David, the son of Jesse has often to take up the lament in a different sense from the ori ginal,-"I am distressed for thee, my Brother Jonathan!" Better still, his sisters, nieces, female cousins, flock on various honorable pretexts to visit him amidst his new possessions, where they own with no Sabine reluctance the constraining ardor of our un sophisticated chivalry; and happy is the household over which a New England wife presides! blessed the child whose cradle is rocked by the hand, whose slumber is hallowed by the prayers of a New Eng land mother! The order of the Roman policy is reversed. He conquered, and then inhabited; the New Englander inhabits, then gains the mastery, not by force of arms, but by mother-wit, steadiness, and thrift. That there should be, among us of the other races, a little occasional petulance, is not to be wondered at; but it is only superficial. The New Englander goes forth not as a spy or an enemy, and the gifts which he carries excite gratitude, not fear. He soon becomes identified with his neighbors, their interests are soon his, and the benefits of his enterprising cleverness swell the advantage of the community where he has planted himself, thus tending to produce a moral homogeneousness throughout the confederacy. Yet let it be remembered that this New England influence, diffusing itself, like noiseless but transforming leaven, through the recent and future states, while it makes them precious as allies, would also make them formidable as rivals, terrible as enemies. The New Englander loses little of his main characteristics by migration. He is as shrewd, though not necessarily as economical, a calculator in the valley of the Mississippi, as his brethren in the east, and as brave as his fathers were at Lexington or Charlestown. It were the height of suicidal folly for the people of the maritime states to attempt holding as subjects or tributaries, directly or indirectly, the people between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains; but those who have not travelled among our prairie and forest settlements can have only a faint idea of the filial reverence, the deferential respect, the yearning love, with which they turn to the land where their fathers sleep, and to you who guard their sepulchres. The soul knows nothing of distance, and, in their twilight musings, they can scarcely tell which is dearer to their hearts -the home of the kindred they have left behind them, or the home they have won for their off. spring Be it your anxious care, intelligent gentlemen of New England, that so strong a bond is never strained to rupture!

*

To your Pilgrim Fathers the highest place may well be accorded, but forget not, that, about the time of their landing on the Rock, there came to the mouth of the Hudson men of kindred faith and descent-men equally loving freedom-men from the sea-washed cradle of modern constitutional freedom, whose union of free-burgher-cities taught us

the lesson of confederate independent sovereignties, whose sires were as free, long centuries before Magna Charta, as the English are now, and from whose line of republican princes Britain received the boon of religious toleration, a privilege the statesgeneral had recognised as a primary article of their government when first established; men of that stock, which, when offered their choice of favors from a grateful monarch, asked a University; men whose martyr-sires had baptized their land with their blood; men who had flooded it with ocean-waves rather than yield it to a bigot-tyrant; men, whose virtues were as sober as prose, but sublime as poetry-the men of Holland! Mingled with these, and still further on, were heroic Huguenots, their fortunes broken, but their spirit unbending to prelate or prelate-ridden king. There were others (and a dash of cavalier blood told well in battle-field and council);—but those were the spirits whom God made the moral substratum of our national character. Here, like Israel in the wilderness, and thousands of miles off from the land of bondage, they were educated for their high calling, until, in the fulness of times, our confederacy with its Constitution was founded. Already there had been a salutary mixture of blood, but not enough to impair the Anglo-Saxon ascendency. The nation grew morally strong from its original elements. The great work was delayed only by a just preparation. Now God is bringing hither the most vigorous scions from all the European stocks, to "make of them all one new MAN!" not the Saxon, not the German, not the Gaul, not the Helvetian, but the AMERICAN. Here they will unite as one brotherhood, will have one law, will share one interest. Spread over the vast region from the frigid to the torrid, from Eastern to Western ocean, every variety of climate giving them choice of pursuit and modification of temperament, the ballot-box fusing together all rivalries, they shall have one national will. What is wanting in one race will be supplied by the characteristic energies of the others; and what is excessive in either, checked by the counter-action of the rest. Nay, though for a time the newly come may retain their foreign vernacular, our to: gue, so rich in ennobling literature, will be the tongue of the nation, the language of its laws, and the accent of its majesty. ETERNAL GOD! who seest the end with the beginning, thou alone canst tell the ultimate grandeur of this people!

EDWARD SANFORD,

A POET, essayist, and political writer, is the son of the late Nathan Sanford, Chancellor of the State, and was born in the city of New York in 1805. He was educated at Union College, where he was graduated in 1824. He then engaged in the study of the law in the office of Mr. Benjamin F. Butler, but his tastes were opposed to the profession, and he did not pursue it.

He began an editorial career as editor of a newspaper in Brooklyn; was next associated with the New York Standard; and when that paper was compelled to yield to the commercial einbarrassments of the day, he became one of the editors of the New York Times. The difficulties in politics which occurred after the second year of the establishment of that paper led him to undertake an engagement at Washington with Mr. Blair as associate editor of the Globe newspaper, then the organ of the Van Buren administration. In this relation his pen was employed in the advocacy and development of the sub-treasury system, then

In 1843, he was elected to the Senate of the state of New York, and while there was an active and efficient, though quiet political manager and leader.

An anecdote of the Capitol exhibits his poetic talent. One day in the senate room he received a note from a correspondent on business; it was at the close of the session, and the whole house in the hurry and confusion which attend its last moments. He had a score or more measures to hurry through, and numerous others to aid in their passage, and thus pre-sed, answered the letter handed to him. A few days after he was surprised to learn that he had written this hasty reply in excellent verse.

Of the literary productions of Mr. Sanford, a few only have appeared with his name. Mr. Bryant included the quaint and poetical Address to Black Hawk in his collection of American poems, and Mr. Hoffman presented this and the author's Address to a Mosquito, written in a similar vein, in the "New York Book of Poetry."

To the New York Mirror, the Knickerbocker Magazine, and the Spirit of the Times, Mr. Sanford has been a frequent and genial contributor. His poem, The Loves of the Shell Fishes, has been justly admired for its fancy and sentiment, in delicate flowing verse, as he sings

Not in the land where beauty loves to dwell,

And bards to sing that beauty dwell th there:
Not in the land where rules th' enchanter's spell
And fashion's beings beautiful and rare;
Not in such land are laid the scenes I tell.
No odors float upon its sunny air;
No ruddy vintage, and no tinted flowers
Gladden its fields or bloom within its bowers.

Mine is a lowlier lay-the unquiet deep-
The world of waters; where man's puny skill
Has but along its surface dared to creep:
The quaking vassal of its wayward will,
Exultant only when its calm waves sleep,
And its rough voice is noiseless all and still,
And trembling when its crested hosts arise,
Roused from their slumbers by the wind's wild cries.
None but the dead have visited its caves;

None but the dead pressed its untrampled floor. Eyes, but all sightless, glare beneath its waves,

And forms earth's worshippers might well adore, Lie in their low and ever freshened graves,

All cold and loveless far beneath its roar.
The bright-eyed maiden and the fair-haired bride,
And sire and son there slumber side by side.

Smile not ye wise ones at my lowly lay,

Nor deem it strange that underneath a shell High thoughts exert their ever ruling sway

And soft affections scorn not there to dwell. That in an oyster's breast the living ray Of mind beams forth; or that its young thoughts swell

Less vanntingly in pride of place or birth
Than aught that breathes upon our upper earth.
Of blighted hopes and confidence betrayed—

Of princely dames and wights of low degree—
The story of a high-born oyster maid

And her calm lover, of low family:

And how they met beneath their oft sought shade,
The spreading branches of a coral tree,
Attended by a periwinkle page,
Selected chiefly for his tender age,
Sing scaly music.

The best of Mr. Sanford's poetical effusions are of this airy, delicate mood, facile and elegant.

His occasional political squibs were quite in the Croaker vein, as in this parody at the expense of the Whigs in the Harrison log-cabin campaign.

A HARD-CIDER MELODY.

Air-Tis the last rose of summer.
'Tis the last of Whig loafers
Left singing alone,
All his pot-house companions
Are fuddled and gone.
No flower of his kindred,
No rum-blossom nigh,
With a song on his lips
And a drop in his eye.

I'll not leave thee, thou rose-bud,
To pine on the stem,
Since the others are snoring,

Go suore thou with them.

Thus kindly I lay

A soft plank 'neath thy head, Where thy mates of the cabin Lie, hard-cider dead.

So soon may I follow,

When the Whigs all decay,

And no cider is left us

To moisten our clay.

When the Whigs are all withered,
And hard-cider gone,
Oh who would inhabit

This sad world alone?

As an essayist, Mr. Sanford holds a very happy pen. His articles of this class, in the newspapers of the day, touch lightly and pleasantly on cheerful topics. A humorous description of a city celebrity, A Charcoal Sketch of Pot Pie Palmer, first published in the old Mirror, is a highly felicitous specimen of his powers in this line, and is quite as worthy in its way as a satire as the celebrated Memoir of P. P., Clerk of the Parish.

ADDRESS TO BLACKHAWK.

There's beauty on thy brow, old chief! the high
And manly beauty of the Roman mould,
And the keen flashing of thy full dark eye
Speaks of a heart that years have not made cold,
Of passions scathed not by the blight of time,
Ambition, that survives the battle rout.
The man within thee scorns to play the mime
To gaping crowds that compass thee about.
Thou walkest, with thy warriors by thy side,
Wrapped in fierce hate, and high unconquered pride.
Chief of a hundred warriors! dost thou yet-
Vanquished and captive-dost thou deem that
here-
The glowing day-star of thy glory set-

Dull night has closed upon thy bright career?

Old forest lion, caught and caged at last, Dost pant to roam again thy native wild To gloat upon the life-blood flowing fast

Of thy crushed victims; and to slay the child,
To dabble in the gore of wives and mothers,
And kill, old Turk! thy harmless pale-faced bro-
thers.

For it was cruel, Black Hawk, thus to flutter
The dove-cotes of the peaceful pioneers,
To let thy pride commit such fierce and utter
Slaughter among the folks of the frontiers.
Though thine be old, hereditary hate,

Begot in wrongs, and nursed in blood, until
It had become a madness, 'tis too late

To crush the hordes who have the power, and will, To rob thee of thy hunting grounds and fountains, And drive thee back to the Rocky Mountains. Spite of thy looks of cold indifference,

There's much thou'st seen that must excite thy wonder,

Wakes not upon thy quick and startled sense

The cannon's harsh and pealing voice of thunder? Our big canoes, with white and wide-spread wings, That sweep the waters, as birds sweep the sky;Our steamboats, with their iron lungs, like things Of breathing life, that dash and hurry by? Or if thou scorn'st the wonders of the ocean, What think'st thou of our railroad locomotion? Thou'st seen our Museums, beheld the dummies That grin in darkness in their coffin cases; What think'st thou of the art of making mummies, So that the worms shrink from their dry embraces! Thou'st seen the mimic tyrants of the stage

Strutting, in paint and feathers, for an hour; Thou'st heard the bellowing of their tragic rage, Seen their eyes glisten and their dark brows lower.

Anon, thou'st seen them, when their wrath cooled down,

Pass in a moment from a king-to clown.

Thou seest these things unmoved, say'st so, old fellow?

Then tell us, have the white man's glowing daugh

ters

Set thy cold blood in motion? Hast been mellow By a sly cup or so, of our fire waters?

They are thy people's deadliest poison. They First make them cowards, and then white men's slaves.

And sloth, and penury, and passion's prey,

And lives of misery, and early graves. For by their power, believe me, not a day goes, But kills some Foxes, Sacs, and Winnebagoes. Say, does thy wandering heart stray far away? To the deep bosom of thy forest home, The hillside, where thy young papooses play, And ask, amid their sports, when wilt thou come? Come not the wailings of thy gentle squaws,

For their lost warrior, loud upon thine ear, Piercing athwart the thunder of huzzas,

That, yelled at every corner, meet thee here? The wife that made that shell-decked wampum belt, Thy rugged heart must think of her, and melt.

Chafes not thy heart, as chafes the panting breast
Of the caged bird against his prison bars,
That thou the crowned warrior of the west,
The victor of a hundred forest wars,
Should'st in thy age become a raree-show
Led like a walking bear about the town,
A new caught monster, who is all the go,

And stared at gratis, by the gaping clown?
Boils not thy blood, while thus thou'rt led about,
The sport and mockery of the rabble rout?

Whence came thy cold philosophy? whence came,
Thou tearless, stern, and uncomplaining one,
The power that taught thee thus to veil the flame
Of thy fierce passions? Thou despisest fun,
And thy proud spirit scorns the white men's glee,
Save thy fierce sport when at the funeral pile,
Of a bound warrior in his agony,

Who meets thy horrid laugh with dying smile,
Thy face, in length reminds one of a Quaker's,
Thy dances, too, are solemn as a Shaker's.

Proud scion of a noble stem! thy tree

Is blanched, and bare, and seared, and leafless

now.

I'll not insult its fallen majesty,

Nor drive with careless hand the ruthless plough Over its roots. Torn from its parent mould,

Rich, warm, and deep, its fresh, free, balmy air, No second verdure quickens in our cold,

New, barren earth; no life sustains it here. But even though prostrate, 'tis a noble ting, Though crownless, powerless, "every inch a king." Give us thy hand, old nobleman of nature,

Proud ruler of the forest aristocracy; The best of blood glows in thy every feature. And thy curled lip speaks scorn for our democracy, Thou wear'st thy titles on that godlike brow;

Let him who doubts them, meet thine eagle eye, He'll quail beneath its glance, and disavow All questions of thy noble family;

For thou may'st here become, with strict propriety, A leader in our city good society.

TO A MOSQUITO.

His voice was very soft, gent'e, and low.-King Lear.
Thou of the soft low voice.-Mrs. Hemans.

Thou sweet musician that around my bed,
Dost nightly come and wind thy little horn,
By what unseen and secret influence led,

Feed'st thou my ear with music till 'tis morn?
The wind-harp's tones are not more soft than thine,
The hum of falling waters not more sweet,
I own, indeed I own thy song divine,

And when next year's warm summer night we meet,

(Till then farewell!) I promise thee to be
A patient listener to thy minstrelsy.
Thou tiny minstrel, who bid thee discourse

Such eloquent music? was't thy tuneful sire?
Some old musician? or did'st take a course

Of lessons from some master of the lyre? Who bid thee twang so sweetly thy small trump? Did Norton form thy notes so clear and full? Art a phrenologist, and is thy bump

Of song developed on thy little skull?

At Niblo's hast thou been when crowds stood mute,
Drinking the bird-like tones of Cuddy's flute?

Tell me the burden of thy ceaseless song—
Is it thy evening hymn of grateful prayer?
Or lay of love, thou pipest through the long

Still night? With song dost drive away dull care? Art thou a vieux garçon, a gay deceiver,

A wandering blade, roaming in search of sweets, Pledging thy faith to every fond believer

Who thy advance with half-way shyness meets? Or art o' the softer sex, and sing'st in glee "In maiden meditation, fancy free."

Thou little Siren, when the nymphs of yore Charmed with their songs till folks forgot to dine And starved, though music fed, upon their shore,

Their voices breathed no softer lays than thine; They sang but to entice, and thou dost sing As if to lull our senses to repose,

That thou may'st use unharmed thy little sting
The very moment we begin to doze:
Thou worse than Syren, thirsty, fierce blood-sipper,
Thou living Vampire and thou Gallinipper.
Nature is full of music, sweetly sings

The bard (and thou sing'st sweetly too).
Through the wide circuit of created things,
Thou art the living proof the bard sings true.
Nature is full of thee: On every shore,

'Neath the hot sky of Corgo's dusky child, From warm Peru to icy Labrador,

The world's free citizen thou roamest wild. Wherever" mountains rise or oceans roll," Thy voice is heard, from "Indus to the pole." The incarnation of Queen Mab art thou,

And "Fancy's midwife."-thou dost nightly sip. With amorous proboscis bending low,

The honey-dew from many a lady's lip(Though that they "straight on kisses dream" I doubt.)

On smiling faces and on eyes that weep, Thou lightest, and oft with " sympathetic snout” "Ticklest men's noses as they lie asleep;" And sometimes dwellest, if I rightly scan, "On the forefinger of an alderman."

Yet thou canst glory in a noble birth,

As rose the sea-born Venus from the wave,
So didst thou rise to life; the teeming earth,
The living water, and the fresh air gave
A portion of their elements to create
Thy little form, though beauty dwells not there.
So lean and gaunt that economic fate

Meant thee to feed on music or on air.
Our veins' pure juices were not made for thee,
Thou living, singing, stinging atomy.

The hues of dying sunset are most fair,

And twilight's tints just fading into night, Most dusky soft; and so thy soft robes are

By far the sweetest when thou tak'st thy flight,
The swan's last note is sweetest, so is thine;
Sweet are the wind harp's tones at distance heard;
"Tis sweet in distance at the day's decline,

To hear the opening song of evening's bid.
But notes of harp or bird at distance float
Less sweetly on the ear than thy last note.
The autumn winds are wailing: 'tis thy dirge;
Its leaves are sear, prophetic of thy doom.
Soon the cold rain will whelm thee, as the surge
Whelms the tost mariner in its watery tomb.
Then soar and sing thy little life away;

Albeit thy voice is somewhat husky now. 'Tis well to end in music life's last day,

Of one so gleeful and so blithe as thou.
For thou wilt soon live through its joyous hours,
And pass away with autumn's dying flowers.

SONG-IMITATED FROM THE FRENCH.

If Jove, when he made this beautiful world,
Had only consulted me,

An ocean of wine should flow in the place
Of the brackish and bitter sea.
Red wine should pour from the fruitful clouds
In place of the tasteless rain,

And the fountains should bubble in ruby ril's
To brim the sparkling main.

No fruit should grow but the round, full grape,
No bowers but the shady vine,
And of all earth's flowers, the queenly rose
Should alone in her beauty shine;
I'd have a few lakes for the choicest juice,
Where it might grow mellow and old,
And my lips should serve as a sluice to drain
Those seas of liquid gold.

CHARCOAL SKETCH OF POT PIE PALMER.

The poets have told us that it is of little use to be a great man, without possessing also a chronicler of one's greatness. Brave and wise men-perhaps the bravest and wisest that ever lived-have died and been forgotten, and all for the want of a poet or an historian to immortalize their valor or their wisdom. Immortality is not to be gained by the might of one man alone. Though its claimant be strong and terrible as an army with banners, he can never succeed without a trumpeter. He may embody a thousand minds; he may have the strength of a thousand arms his enemies may quail before him as the degenerate Italians quailed before the ruthless sabaoth of the north; but without a chronicler of his deeds, he will pass by, like the rush of a whirlwind, with none to tell whence he cometh, or whither he goeth. A great man should always keep a literary friend in py, for he may be assured that his greatness will never be so firmly established as to sustain itself without a prop. Achilles had his poet; and the anger of the nereid-born and Styx-dipped hero is as savage and bitter at this late day, as if he had just poured forth the vials of his wrath. The favorite son of the queen of love, albeit a pious and exemplary man, and free from most of the weaknesses of his erring but charming mother, might have travelled more than the wandering Jew, and, without the aid of a poet, the course of his voyage would now be as little known as the journal of a modern tourist, six months from the day of its publication. The fates decreed him a bard, and the world is not only intimate with every step of his wayfaring, but for hundreds of years it has been puzzling itself to discover his starting-place. There has lived but one man

who has disdained the assistance of his fellow-mortals, and finished with his pen what he began with his sword. We refer to the author of Cæsar's Commentaries, the most accomplished gentleman, take him for all in all, that the world ever saw. Let us descend for a step or two in the scale of greatness, and see whence the lesser lights of immortality have derived their lustre. The Cretan Icarus took upon himself the office of a fowl, and was drowned for all his wings, yet floats in the flights of song, while the names of a thousand wiser and better men of his day passed away before their bodies had scarcely rotted. A poorer devil than the late Samuel Patch never cumbered this fair earth; but he is already embalmed in verse, and by one whose name cannot soon die. A cunning pen has engrossed the record of his deeds, and perfected his judg nent roll of fame. He is a coheir in glory with the boy of Crete-the one flew, and the other leapel, into immortality.

There is one name connected with the annals of our city, which should be snatched from oblivion. Would that a strong hand could be found to grasp it, for it is a feeble clutch that now seeks to drag it by the locks from the deep forgetfulness in which it is fast sinking. Scarcely ten years have passed, since the last bell of the last of the bellmen was rung, since the last joke of the joke-master general of our goodly metropolis was uttered, since the last song of our greatest street-minstrel was sung, and the last laugh of the very soul of laughter was pealed forth. Scarcely ten years have passed, and the public recollection of the man who made more noise in the world than any other of his time, is already dim and shadowy and unsubstantial. A brief notice of this extraordinary man has found admittance into the ephemeral columns of a newspaper.

We will en

deavor to enter his immortality of record in a place where future ages will be more likely to find it. As Dr. Johnson would have said, "of Pot Pie Palmer, let us indulge the pleasing reminiscence."

The character of Pot Pie Palmer was a kindly mingling of the elements of good-nature, gentleness of spirit, quickness and delicacy of perception, an in tuitive knowledge of mankind, and an ambition, strange and peculiar in its aspirations, but boundless. There were sundry odd veins and streaks which ran through and wrinkled this goodly compound, in the shape of quips and quirks and quiddities, which crossed each other at such strange angles, and turned round such short corners, that few were able to analyse the moral anatomy of the man. It is not strange then, that his character should have been generally misunderstood. He was a jester by profession, but he was no mime. Unlike a clown at a country fair, who grins for half-pence, he asked no compensation for his services in the cause of public mirth. He was a volunteer in the business of making men merry, for it was no part of his calling to put the world in good humor, and it has never been hinted that he received a shilling from the corporation for his extra services in the cause of happiness and contentment. He might have been as serious as his own cart-horse, without the slightest risk of losing his place. If he had preserved a becoming gravity, he might have aspired to a higher office than that of the chief of the corporation scavengers; for a long face has ever been a passport to preferme t. But he disdained to leave his humble calling as long as he was sure he could remain at its head. He knew full well that there were few who could chime with him, and he would play second to no man's music. He was mirthful, partly from a spirit of philanthropy, and partly because he was so filled with gleeful and fantastic associations, that they overflowed in spite of him. He was not merely a passive instrument that required the cunning touch of a master to awaken its music, or like a wind-harp that is voiceless till the wind sweeps over it. He was a piece of mechanism that played of its own accord, and was never mute, and his notes were as varied as those of a mock-bird. If there were those around him who could enjoy a joke, he offered them a fair share of it, and bade them partake of it and be thankful to the giver and if there was no one at hand with whom to divide it, he swallowed it himself-and with an appetite that would make a dyspeptic forget that he had a stomach.

He was the incarnation of a jest. His face was a broad piece of laughter, done in flesh and blood. His nose had a whimsical twist, as the nose of a humorist should have. His mouth had become elongated by frequent cachinnations; for his laugh was of most extraordinary dimensions, and required a wide portal to admit it into the free air, and his eyes twinkled and danced about in his head as if they were determined to have a full share in the fun that was going on. Time had seamed his brow, but had also endued it with a soft and mellow beauty; for the spirit of mirth was at his side when he roughened the old man's visage, and had planted a smile in every furrow.

Pot Pie Palmer, like many other great men, was indifferent to the duties of the toilet; but it was not for want of a well appointed wardrobe, for he seldom made his appearance twice in the same dress; and it is not an insignificant circumstance in his biography, that he was the last distinguished personage that appeared in public in a cocked hat. In dress, manners, and appearance, he stuck to the old school, and there was nothing new about him but his jokes. He would sometimes, in a moment of odd fancy, exhibit himself in a crownless hat and bootless feet, probably in honor of his ancestors, the Palmers of yore, who wore their sandal shoon and scallop shell. It may be well to remark, while on the subject of