sive or oppressive dignity, but a genial and modest communion with them, and even an affectionate fellowship with those who were closely associated with him in the public service or in private life. In short, the letters show, what history cannot do, the gentle side of the great man's nature, which endeared him to all who came within the influence of it; there is proof of this in a little incident which might easily have perished out of the memories of men, if it had not been witnessed by one upon whose genuine delicacy of feeling it was not lost, and who wisely judged it worthy of record. The incident is so simple, and Bishop White's little narrative of it is given with such graceful simplicity, that I almost fear the feeling cannot be communicated by repetition. It was in a letter to the biographer of Washington that Bishop White communicated what may be entitled an

ANECDOTE CONCERNING PRESIDENT WASHINGTON.

"On the day before his leaving the presidential chair, a large company dined with him. Among them were the foreign ministers and their ladies, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, Mr. Jefferson, with other conspicuous persons of both sexes. During the dinner much hilarity prevailed; but on the removal of the cloth, it was put an end to by the President―certainly without design. Having filled his glass, he addressed the company, with a smile on his countenance, as nearly as can be recollected, in the following terms: 'Ladies and gentleman, this is the last time I shall drink your health as a public man. I do it with sincerity, and wishing you all possible happiness.' There was an end to all pleasantry. He who gives this relation

accidentally directed his eye to the lady of the British minister, (Mrs. Liston,) and tears were running down her cheeks."*

I have referred to this as proof of that blending of the gentle with more impressive traits of character, which may be seen in Letters and not on the pages of history.

The letters of Dr. Franklin were in like manner remarkable for their extended historical interest-more extended indeed than Washington's, both in time and place, for the correspondence, continuing nearly as late, began much earlier, and carries the reader, therefore, further back into colonial society; it was enlarged, too, by a long and renewed European residence, first in England, with intercourse with Lord Chatham and other British statesmen friendly to the colonial cause, and to Franklin personally; and afterward in France, where the sagacious and simply-attired republican was a fashionable novelty, caressed by the nobles and ladies of the court of Louis the Sixteenth. The letters of Franklin have also an additional interest by his connection with that large community, the society of men of science, not limited to the soil of any country. It is a correspondence which has further attraction, as showing that fine mastery which Franklin-by the help of a plain but substantial education, by

* Dr. Wilson's Memoir of Bishop White. p. 191. Let me here record the expression of my regret that the editor of a work published lately in this country called "The Republican Court," (p. 305,) should have preserved, on very uncertain, and, to my mind doubtful, tradition, an anecdote of Washington's violence of language and temper in most painful contrast with this anecdote. W. B. R.

native sagacity, and continued culture-acquired in the use of good English speech.*

The American diplomatic correspondence of that period is interesting, too, as containing the impressions of sagacious men trained in the simplicity of republican life, (for the British colonics in America were virtually republics before independence;) such men brought into contact with artificial European society, and with political systems fast teuding toward the great revolutionary convulsions at the close of the last century. It is not the least instructive portion of American state-papers, which somewhat later describes the progress of the French Revolution, as it appeared to one with high-toned, aristocratic political views, like Mr. Gouverneur Morris, or to one with democratic inclinations like Mr. Monroe, and whose letters have respectively recorded what they witnessed in revolutionary Paris.

It is an easy and natural transition from the statesmen of the American Revolution to one who, in Parliament, was the friend and advocate of America in the hour of need-the Earl of Chatham; he who, as William Pitt, holds a title of the world's bestowing, "the great Commoner;" who gave to England, in that corrupt and degenerate eighteenth century, the example of a pure and lofty patriotism, and whose statesmanship may be paralleled with

* I know of few more graceful specimens of style than one from Franklin's letter to Lord Kames on 17th August, 1762. "I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the Old World to the New; and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving this world for the next; grief at the parting-fear of the passagehope of the future." Spark's Franklin, vol. i. p. 269. W. B. R.

Washington's in magnanimity. Unlike Washington, however, in simplicity of character, he seemed impelled, by the fame he had gained as an orator, to carry a sort of oratorical ambition into all his ways of life: in a letter of advice to his nephew, he says, "Behaviour, though an external thing, which seems rather to belong to the body than to the mind, is certainly founded in considerable virtues."* It has been said of him that his very infirmities were managed to the best advantage, and that in his hands even his crutch could become a weapon of oratory; but that this striving for effect has helped to give to his private letters a forced and unnatural appearance-the style of homely texture, but here and there pieced with pompous epithets and swelling phrases. The praise of a Roman.

Chatham Correspondence, p. 77.

† Lord Mahon's History, vol. iii. p. 20. As this volume is going through the press, I have received from London a little tract privately printed by Lord Mahon, called "Lord Chatham at Chevening, 1769.” Chevening is the seat of Earl Stanhope; and thither in 1769, in the absence of the owners on the Continent, came the valetudinarian statesman. This tract contains the letters of Mr. Brampton, the steward, describing to his mistress the demeanour of the guests: "The two young ladies in the yellow mohair room-Master William in the nursery. "Lord Chatham playing at billiards with the young gentlemen and ladies, so long as to bring on the gout in his ankle," &c. &c. It would seem from the tract that the poor steward had some trouble from the Earl's changeableness, and that though but a guest, he acted (as on other occasions he was apt to do) very much like an imperious master.

I confess a strong admiration for Lord Chatham, with all his infirmities; themselves palliated by what is now conceded, his occasional intellectual prostration. Horace Walpole, whose letters are read by everybody, and who had good hereditary cause to hate him, has damaged his fame with studious posterity; and yet where is there a nobler tribute to an English statesman than in one sentence of Walpole, in a letter to Mason, written when Chatham was in his grave?" The Admi

spirit, in the best sense of that term, has often been justly claimed for Pitt; and when writing to his wife, he says to Lady Chatham, "Be of cheer, noble love!" It sounds like Coriolanus speaking to the sister of Poplicola, or Brutus to his wife, the daughter of Cato. If the Chatham correspondence both in the public and private letters-is distinguished by this stateliness of style, it is no less so by a loftiness of feeling and by the large thoughts of genuine statesmanship.

If Lord Chatham's oratory transgressed into his letters, the reverse may be observed in a living British statesman, more illustrious as a soldier. That simple and somewhat peremptory sententiousness which marks the Duke of Wellington's writings, whether an important public despatch or a private note, is also the tone of his parliamentary speeches. Whether writing or speaking, he uses words with a stern frugality, and sends them straight to their mark. Trained by the discipline of camp to know and feel the mischief of a waste of words, he has gained, through long service as a soldier and a statesman, a soldierly command of the language, producing a practical species of eloquence, wherein the most serviceable words are marshalled in compact and effective order. It is now near fifty years since, in his camp in India, he said that, when business could be done verbally, correspondence should be forbidden, to save the time of officers in perusing, considering, and copying voluminous documents about nothing; and, as commander-in-chief, he

ral has relieved Gibraltar. The Spanish fleet ran into their burrows, as if Lord Chatham was alive." Letters to Mason, vol. ii. p. 179. W. B. R.