gently for the benefit of ages to come. This is the nature of constitutional liberty; and this is our liberty if we will rightly understand and preserve it. Every free government is naturally complicated, because all such governments establish restraints as well on the power of government itself as on that of individuals. If we will abolish the distinction of branches and have but one branch; if we abolish jury trials and leave all to the judge; if we then ordain that the legislator himself be that judge; and if we place the executive power in the same hands, we may readily simplify government. We may easily bring it to the simplest of all possible forms, a pure despotism."

In the same speech there is a figure which has often been quoted, but which is so beautiful that we shall lay it before our readers. It is, the reader will perceive, an expansion of a well-known expression, but more beautiful than the original; Webster is speaking of England as 66 a power to which Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military hosts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

It was such passages as this which caused men to hang delighted on the lips of Webster, and another cause was his thorough nationality, which, like that of Shakespere, seemed ever to pervade his words, for America, the one whole and undivided nation, he would have perilled everything,-how well he could declaim on the beauties of union, the following, from a speech at a dinner given to him in 1851, and at which Sir H. Bulwer was present, will testify:

their batteries on some useless abstraction, some false dogma, or some gratuitous assumption. Or, perhaps, it may be more proper to say, that they look at it with microscopic eyes, seeking for some spot, or speck, or blot, or blur, and if they find anything of this kind, they are at once for overturning the whole fabric. And, when nothing else will answer, they invoke religion and speak of a higher law. Gentlemen, this North Mountain is high, the Blue Ridge higher still; the Alleghany higher than either; and yet this higher law ranges farther than an eagle's flight above the highest peaks of the Alleghany. No common vision can discern it; no conscience, not transcendental and ecstatic, can feel it; the hearing of common men never listens to its high behests; and therefore one should think it not a safe law to be acted on, in matters of the highest practical moment. It is the code, however, of the fanatical and factious abolitionists of the North.

"The secessionists of the South take a different course of remark. They are learned and eloquent; they are animated and full of spirit; they are highminded and chivalrous; they state their supposed injuries and causes of complaint in elegant phrases and exalted tones of speech. But these complaints are all vague and general. I confess to you, gentlemen, that I know no hydrostatic pressure strong enough to bring them into any solid form, in which they could be seen or felt. They think otherwise, doubtless. But, for one, I can discern nothing real or wellgrounded in their complaints. If I may be allowed to be a little professional, I would say that all their complaints and alleged grievances are like a very insufficient plea in the law; they are bad on general demurrer for “The support of the Union is a great want of substance. But I am not dispractical subject, involving the pros-posed to reproach these gentlemen, or pects and glory of the whole country, and affecting the prosperity of every individual in it. We ought to take a large and comprehensive view of it; to look to its vast results, and to the consequences which would flow from its overthrow. It is not a mere topic for ingenious disquisition, or theoretical or fanatical criticism. Those who assail the Union at the present day seem to be persons of one idea only, and many of them but half an idea. They plant

to speak of them with disrespect. I prefer to leave them to their own reflections. I make no arguments against resolutions,

conventions, secession speeches, or proclamations. Let these things go on. The whole matter, it is to be hoped, will blow over, and men will return to a sounder mode of thinking. But one thing, gentlemen, be assured of, the first step taken in the programme of secession, which shall be an actual infringement of the Con

stitution or the Laws, will be promptly met. And I would not remain an hour in any administration that should not immediately meet any such violation of the Constitution and the Law effectually, and at once."

adjusted to states, and a minister who can secure the permanent approbation of his own countrymen with as fair a renown abroad as was enjoyed by Daniel Webster, has achieved as much glory as even the best politicians are likely to obtain.

The disappointment of defeat was poignant, and Webster lived not long after it, he went home to Marshfield to die, and died better in good honest truth, than latterly he had lived. We have not touched upon his private vices, nor will we; his neighbours loved him for his farmerlike manners and kindly presence and voice, and there are few more touching scenes than that which follows:

The speech quoted, however, savours of slavery, which was the rock upon which Webster split. He seems to have been a man supremely suited to his age and country. An age which worships intellect more than any other age, and which also counts upon riches as the greatest good. To lead it and conquer its vanity and to guide it to a higher aim, the great man should be gifted above all, with a fine conscience, and a great heart, great in affection, and greatest in all in his religion, and "He had started small and poor, had his dependence on his God. Daniel Web-risen great and high, and honourably ster seems to have been in his last days fought his way alone. He was a farmer, little else than intellect, and intellect and took a countryman's delight in of the most busy and bustling kind country things-in loads of hay, in without God, bending to expediency, trees, turnips and the noble Indian corn, he forgot the eternal law of right; in monstrous swine. He had a patritruckling for the Presidential chair, he arch's love of sheep-choice breeds gave an absolute negation to his nobler thereof he had. He took delight in speeches, and sought to aggrandize cows-short-horned Durhams, Herehimself by the misery of his fellows. fordshires, Ayrshires, Alderneys. He These are grave faults; but even those tilled paternal acres with his own more base in the eyes of the world, are oxen. He loved to give the kine fodder. laid to his charge. "A senator of the It was pleasant to hear his talk of oxen. United States," says Theodore Parker, And but three days before he left the "he was pensioned by the manufac- earth, too ill to visit them, his oxen, turers of Boston. Their gifts in his lowing, came to see their sick lord, and hands, how could he dare be just? as he stood in his door his great cattle His later speeches smelt of bribes." were driven up, that he might smell Alas! the student of history is not their healthy breath, and look his last comforted by recalling the rapacious-on those broad generous faces that were ness of Raleigh, and the venality of never false to him." Francis Bacon, or the blot which a bribe has fixed upon the name of Sidney. Webster is one more fallen from bright hopes and brilliant beginnings, one more example that the heaven which "lies about us in our infancy," and still glows in our youth and honest manhood, grows dark and sullen as we near the grave.

Weighing well these facts, we shall concur in the estimate given by one who has no interest to praise or blame. He presents a marked resemblance to Daniel O'Connell, but he enjoys this superiority of the great Agitator, that he never seriously designed to lead his countrymen astray.... He was beyond all doubt an acute lawyer, an accomplished scholar, an experienced diplomatist and a great statesman.... It must be remembered that ministers are

We have told how he died, broken and worn with storms of state and wrecked ambition, and after his death all his backslidings were forgotten, and the people mourned for him as they might for a great and mighty voice which henceforth was to be silent amongst them. They showed respect in every possible way, the ships lowered their flags half-mast high, the papers went in mourning.

Before the interment took place, the body was removed to a lawn in front of the mansion, and placed on a bier beneath one of the large poplar trees, and from nine to half-past one the assembled multitudes took a last look. The countenance was serene and life-like. Two garlands of acorns and oak leaves, and two bouquets of flowers were placed on the coffin. Many shed tears and grieved

for the loss, as for a departed father or dear friend. The funeral procession contained no carriages, nor were there any ladies, but to such a length did it extend, that the corpse had reached the grave before scarcely two-thirds had left the house. The burial took place exactly at half-past two o'clock, and an eloquent prayer was offered up by the Rev. Mr. Olden, the parish minister. The funeral was attended by upwards of 10,000 persons; among whom were Gen. Franklin Peirce, (now President,) Governor Massy, the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, the Hon. Edward Everett, the Hon. Charles Ashman, Chancellor Jones, &c. The whole of the proceedings were solemn, appropriate, and affecting. Mr. Webster was buried on his own grounds, by the side of his At New York a general feel

children.

ing of mourning was perceptible; the ships of all nations lying along the course of the north and east rivers displayed their flags at half mast, and minute guns were fired throughout the day. And so passed away from amongst his people Daniel Webster, bearing once the proud title of "Expounder and Defender of his Nation's Laws;" and if accomplishing little, yet reverenced as he was for his intellectual power, leaving a great name which will long be heard of in America.

Hurl'd into fragments by the tempest blast

The Rhodian monster lies; the obelisk

That with sharp line divided the broad disc
Of Egypt's sun, down to the sands was cast:
And where these stood, no remnant trophy stands,
And even the art is lost by which they rose;
Thus with the monuments of other lands,
yet triumph not, O Time; strong towers decay,
The place that knew them, now no longer knows.
But a great name shall never pass away!

THE CARICATURISTS.

It is much to be regretted that to many | written about poetically? asked the minds certain objects which excite scoffers; and so they scoffed down mirth, should be looked upon as weak, Wordsworth, whilst they allowed poetry frivolous, and beneath notice, as if He- to a pirate as in "Lara," or a rake as raclitus were the true philosopher, and "Don Juan." But Wordsworth won the Democritus none. Books which are battle which he fought, and brought amusing have been too often set down poetry to the humblest hearth, and we as the very reverse of instructive, and are rapidly winning ours. The truth is, dry uninteresting treatises have been that wisdom is sometimes clothed in deemed the proper garb of science. the jester's motley, and as deep morality Yet few dogmas have less of truth in and meaning lies in the gibes of the them than the foregoing; Horace per-gravedigger, or the jests of Yorick, as ceived this long ago, and boldly asks, in the melancholy of Hamlet.

"Ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat ?"

and some bold spirits in our own day
have absolutely made knowledge inte-
resting, and planted flowers along the
dusty high way of the schools. At first
they were laughed at; one who amused
his readers was declared not to be pro-
found, just as Wordsworth, when he
called a bird a nightingale, and not
Philomel," and left off styling the sun
'Bright Phoebus," or " Apollo's golden
fire," was thought by many to be very
unpoetical. A fault which he quadru-
pled by writing, poetically, of "the Cum-
berland Beggar," "the Idiot Boy," and
"the Female Vagrant." How could an
idiot, a vagrant and a beggar, things
essentially unpoetical in themselves, be

These remarks will perhaps be found necessary to introduce an article upon "Caricature in a work intended for the student and the closet; we shall find that many grave affairs have been brought about by the pencil of a Gilray, and many a lesson taught by the etching point of a Cruikshank, whilst to the Historian, such notices illustrating as they do a very important portion of our history, will not be found uninteresting.

But, whilst thus insisting upon the dignity of our paper, we must not be thought to countenance in any way undue, stupid and frivolous levity. A wit of our own day has endeavoured to render history comic. The grand legends of Rome have been made the vehicle for word-play and pun; and the

noble achievements of our fathers, their hard-won liberties, their blood-shedding and battles; their martyrdom and imprisonments, have been made the vehicles of the smart sentence and the inane jest. Nothing could be more odious to the writer, or more hurtful to the young than such a proceeding; how could they reverence past ages, their early acquaintance with which began with laughter? how could they worship a hero whose deeds had been a subject of jest? No; such is not the purpose of this paper; too much dulness is indeed a grave fault; but unbounded levity, often, as in the case of a modern revolution, the concomitant of impiety and cruelty, is a sin.

But to our subject.

discovery of the printing press carried its boon to the caricaturist as to every one else; by it impressions could be multiplied indefinitely; and it was therefore during the latter part of the 16th and more than ever during the 17th centuries that caricatures became the potent weapons which they are in political warfare, and formidable instruments in working upon the feelings of the populace.

But the reader must not fall into the common mistake of regarding this art as entirely comic. Nothing can be farther from the truth. In their earliest period they were seldom, if ever, pictures merely to provoke a laugh, but were serious affairs, frequently of a very savage nature, and made subservient to Caricature seems to be derived from the political warfare which was then an Italian word, caricare, to overload, going on, the character of which they, and therefore a caricature has been well of course, partook. The chief of our defined as a loaded, overcharged repre- English caricatures were imported from sentation. Caricature in painting, Holland, and they first came into exbears an affinity to Burlesque in poetry, tensive circulation and notoriety after and a finely drawn caricature would bear the revolution of 1688, which happily the same analogy to Raphael's picture placed the third William upon an Enof the Last Judgment, as Butler's Hu-glish throne. No doubt, this arose dibras does to Paradise Lost as an epic from the fact of England possessing no poem. Addison defines caricature, as artists of sufficient skill to enable them pictures "where the art consists in pre- to produce the plates rapidly and effecserving amidst distorted proportions tively. The caricatures, of which there and aggravated features, some distin- were plenty which satirized the Protecguishing likeness of the person." Such, tor Cromwell, were executed chiefly by indeed, is the style of caricature which the Dutch; and in the flood of this was prevalent in his day, but we have arrived to a much more refined state of the art, and have been gradually progressing towards, perhaps, a perfection which the elder caricaturists little dreamt of.

kind of pictures, which that stirring time of speculation, the days of the South Sea Bubble gave rise to, the large majority came from the Dutch. Their character was totally different to what we now understand by the same The application of pictures of a satiri- term. They were chiefly emblematical, cal kind to politics, which constitutes and in a folio volume of them, all relating the great body of the caricatures with to the speculating mania, which prewhich we shall have to deal, is, it has vailed both in Holland and France at been well observed, no new thing, and the time of Law and his Mississippi can be traced among every people with scheme, and which was published under whom, historically, we have any ac- the title of "Her groote Tafereel de quaintance. In the very centre of the Devaasheid," (The great Picture of Pyramids, upon Egyptian tombs, cari- Folly,) some of them are so difficult to catures have been found; and many an divine, and have so very little point, that old manuscript or sculptured piece of an authority on the subject has sugwood tells us that our most remote an-gested that the great sale of caricatures cestors enlivened the darkness of the made the booksellers look up old plates middle ages with pictorial satire. But published upon totally different subin those days the artists laboured under jects, and after adding new inscriptions immense disadvantages. Engraving and new explanations publish them as was indeed understood, but the art of caricatures on the Bubble. multiplying the impressions from the plate, and spreading them before the eyes of the Many was unknown. The of the House of Hanover. *Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., "History

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