shore, and bearing Burke's frank as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the superscription, while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower corner. But English law, while the privilege of franking existed, required also that the name of the place where the letter was posted, and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should appear in the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in this collection :

:

Margate July seventeenth, 1791
"Mr Swift,

"Mr Burke's Chambers
"4 Stone Buildings
"Lincoln's Inn
"London.

"Edm. Burke."

These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of them that "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest dependants with whom he was thrown into any human relationship"; they also "show the statesman, when at the height of literary fame, as busy and anxious in sending his sheets through the press, and making corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs "; and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as illustrations of Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to the Nagles in former years.” It seems that the amanuensis to whom they were addressed had at his death other similar letters in his possession; but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately committed them to the flames, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr. Macknight adds, in a note, "These letters I owe to the kindness of John Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the originals.""

the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of Burke.

But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript of the "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the identical copy from which the surreptitious publication was made which disturbed the last hours of Burke. The body of it is in the handwriting of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters were addressed; but it shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute and elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of these pages there is an accurate fac-simile in the third volume of Mr. Macknight, who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister, after his death, to the gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect it."*

These manuscripts - both the letters and the Observations- all concern the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between himself and Fox, to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate their value, we must glance at the scene by which the memorable friendship of these men was closed.

Few political events in English history are read with more interest than the separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but the French Revolution, which separated so many persons in France, reached across the Channel to separate them. They differed so radically with regard to this portentous, undeveloped movement, that their relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed. Burke, in the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most earnestly inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet in me at my time of life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to friends to desert me." Fox whispered, "There is no loss of friends." Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes, there is a loss of friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my Life of Burke, Vol. III. p. 700.

*

duty at the expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished, Burke walked across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between Pitt and Dundas on the Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears streamed down his face. In the course of his remarks he intimated that Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious terms. Burke at once said that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox replied, "My right honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of his mind.

Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish a recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and forgotten."

But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth again. "I complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my defence by the right honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was brought to me and evinced the most promising talents, which I used my best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has arrived at the maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of my principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend," but as "the right honorable gentleman," and said, in a taunting style, that "all he had to do was to repent, and his friends would be ready to receive him back and love him as they had previously done." Burke was indignant. He said, "I have gone through my youth without encountering any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so unfortunate as to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's friendship, nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the other." This most important and historic friendship was at an end.

The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke turned away from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly productions

• Parliamentary History, Vol. XXIX. p. 426.

of his pen, entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in the collection before us, addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last corrections of this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is the letter of which a fac-simile is given by Mr. Macknight.

Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed and intense. The Whig Club declared, “that their confidence in Mr. Fox was confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against him." Burke and some forty-five noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the club. It was then that Burke, in justification of himself and his friends, took the pen, and drew up what his biographer Prior calls the "famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority, particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third volume of Bohn's edition of his Works.

This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections to the course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of that distinguished gentleman. But it was not intended for publication, at least at that time. It was transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with a letter, asking that it might not even be read at once, but that the Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his library-table, and when a day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn to it. Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if not always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the amanuensis whom Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This was none other than Swift, to whom the familiar letters were addressed. Unknown to his employer, he had appropriated to himself a copy in his own handwriting, with corrections and additions by Burke, which seems to have come between the original rough draught and the final copy transmit

ted to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke was in his last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless scrivener communicated this copy to an equally faithless publisher, by whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment against the Right Honorable C. J. Fox." When this was seen by Mrs. Burke, she felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband, that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was relieved so far as it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by the affidavit of Mr. Rivington, succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the publisher on the very day when the tract appeared. But two thousand copies had already stolen abroad.

It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to her husband, learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two o'clock in the afternoon of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to him his newspapers and correspondence for the past week. He was less disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does vex me," he said; "but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or

Edmund Curll. . But he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr. Lawrence, about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to deliver back. He had forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and corrected by himself.

This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated to attract attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his last words. Pitt read it with delight, and declared it to be a model in that style of composition. But his latest biographer says of it, that "it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever wrote the Observations on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least pleasing of all his compositions."* In style, it is direct, terse, and compact, beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended for the public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the manuscript now before us exhibits the minute care with which it was executed. Here also may be traced varieties of expression, constituting the dif ferent forms which a thought assumed, not unlike the various drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.

But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now dealing with this relic.

* Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.

THE stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London cannot fail to notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the choir. It is composed of rare and costly marbles and other precious stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it is, its greatest value lies in the circumstance which placed it there. It is a memorial, the tribute of affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms to a noble officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a krñμa kɩ dɛí, is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches, in stately cathedrals, wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be arrested, whereever the pride of country is most deeply stirred, wherever the sentiment of loyalty is consecrated by religion, the Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names of his honored dead. There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense local pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the scenes of their early lives. "It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo; "think what they will say of us at home!" — and this simple sentence went straight to the heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home is the prevailing thought in each young soldier's heart as he goes into his first fight. And "home" does not mean for him so much broad England as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the school where he was trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in times gone by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory, whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after the morning service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be for him the memorial window through whose blazoned panes the sunlight will fall softly across

the "squire's pew," where as a boy he knelt and worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the marble effigies of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a place among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the school-room at Winchester or Harrow or Westminster, -that future boys, playing where he played, shall talk of him whom they never knew as 66 one of ours." For he is well aware that he is making fame not for himself alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most loved and happi

est.

We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local association and sentiment are ingrained. We are but just beginning where Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago. Hence our glorifying of the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years have taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the water-sheds of history. The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child. Life is measured by action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and "fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look back upon a past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet it may be undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole country can

not participate, which will not for the remainder of this century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon the slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is ended, and the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of the returning citizens to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to level the earthworks of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. In the city where mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law, no one cares to keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade, though they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for they witness also to a wickedness and

and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight years' struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence. Alumni still survive who did military duty in the second war with England. The men of Harvard were with Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec capital. Of these the only record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of the "Triennial"

For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid aside the gown for the sash and shoulderstrap, who, first in the bloodless triumphs of the regatta and in “ capital training" for the great race of life where literary and professional fame are the prizes, went forth to venture all for honor and country, the Alma Mater surely should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because of her high responsi

ed.

But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting than brass the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we are doubly bound in gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who have deserved well of their country in the hour of utmost need. We ought to do this also in that temper which shall look most singly to the noble end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future land. I know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in New-England's foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself, the starry roll of its heroes links it with all the fortunes of

r history. Men who sat in the Long Parliament, and who may have seen the Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their early degrees upon Harvard's first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King Philip, were colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of Wolfe and Amherst,

youth," she can do no less. I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal thousands of her surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as he reads the story of her children amid their " baptism of fire." There is a notable peculiarity about this the most purely New-England of our colleges, the continual recurrence of familiar patronymics. I take up the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five hundred names I can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots, Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells, - they come with every Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a hundred and fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent of nobility in this, such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the coronet which marks the union of birth and worth. We cannot, we, the Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep unhonored. Those who shall come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old Harvard, shall occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and Holworthy, have a right not only to count