Now for the mischievous effects of this double cabinet upon the public welfare.

"It is this unnatural infusion of a system of favoritism into a government which in a great part of its constitution is popular, that has raised the present ferment in the nation. The people, without entering deeply into its principles, could plainly perceive its effects, in much violence, in a great spirit of innovation, and in a general disorder in all the functions of government. This is the fountain

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of all those bitter waters, of which, through an hundred different conduits, we have drunk until we are ready to burst. The discretionary power of the crown in the formation of ministry, abused by bad or weak men, has given rise to a system, which, without directly violating the letter of any law, operates against the spirit of the whole constitution. One great end undoubtedly of a mixed government like ours, * is that the prince shall not be able to violate the laws. This is useful, indeed, and fundamental. But this, even at first view, is no more than a negative advantage-an armor merely defensive. It is therefore next in order, and equal in importance, that the discretionary powers, which are necessarily vested in the monarch, whether for the execution of the laws, or for the nomination to magistracy and office, or for conducting the affairs of peace and war, or for ordering the revenue, should all be exercised upon public principles and rational grounds, and not on the likings or prejudices, the intrigues or policies, of a court. This, I said, is equal in importance to the securing a government according to law. The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them. Without them your commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper, and not a living, active, effective constitution. When, therefore, the abettors of the new system tell us, that between them and their opposers there is nothing but a struggle for power, we must tell those, who have the impudence to insult us in this manner, that of all things we ought to be most concerned, who and what sort of men they are that hold the trust of every thing that is dear to us. Nothing can render this a point of indifference to the nation, but what must render us totally desperate, or soothe us into the security of idiots."

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And the personal nature of the objections to a system of administration in the hands of back-stairs favoritism, is well stated in these words:

"The people of a free commonwealth, who have taken such care that their laws should be the result of general consent, cannot be so senseless as to suffer their executory system to be composed of persons on whom they have no dependence, and whom no proofs of the public love and confidence have recommended to those powers, upon the use of which the very being of the state depends."

Of this description are Amos Kendall and his associates; men, who may have ability and integrity, but if they have these qualities, their genuineness has not yet been assayed, and marked, and made current by any proofs of public confidence. They have insinuated themselves into power through the mean by-paths of sycophancy and personal subserviency. They possess no constituency, so to speak; they are not linked by elective ties to one part of the people, nor made known to the rest by responsible public services. These are conditions, without which no man becomes an ostensible head of department; and they apply, with equal force, to the actual possessor of power in a free state, whether he belong to a cabinet proper, or a cabinet improper.

"Those knots or cabals of men who have got together avowedly without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at the higher rate, and are, therefore, universally odious, ought never to be suffered to domineer in the state; because they have no connexion with the sentiments and opinions of the people. Here it is that the people must, on their part, show themselves sensible of their own value. Their whole importance, in the first instance, and

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afterwards their whole freedom, is at stake. We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in the great crisis of this contention; and the part which men take, one way or the other, will serve to discriminate their characters and their principles. Until the matter is decided, the country will remain in its present confusion."

True how can we have peace, until the domination of that corrupt cabal of men, without any principle but to sell their conjunct iniquity at the highest price, be ended?

We conclude these extracts with two or three short ones, applicable to the situation of Congress.

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"Parliament was, indeed, the great object of all these politics, the end at which they aimed, as well as the instrument by which they were to operate. But, before parliament could be made subservient to a system, by which it was to be degraded from the dignity of a national council, into a mere member of the court, it must be greatly changed from its original character. The virtue, spirit, and essence of a house of commons, consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not instituted to be a control upon the people, as of late it has been taught, by a doctrine of the most pernicious tendency. A vigilant and jealous eye over executory and judicial magistracy; an anxious care of public money, an openness approaching towards facility, to public complaint these seem to be the true characteristics of a house of commons. But an addressing house of commons, and a petitioning nation; a house of commons full of confidence, when the nation is plunged in despair; in the utmost harmony with ministers, whom the people regard with the utmost abhorrence; who vote thanks, when the public opinion calls upon them for impeachments; who are eager to grant, when the general voice demands account; who, in all disputes between the administration and the people, presume against the people; who punish their disorders, but refuse even to inquire into the provocations to them this is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in this constitution."

This parallel is just to the letter; in addition to which we have two means, or tests, of judging whether the legislature be corrupt or not; for it is so, when we see,

"First, a rule of indiscriminate support to all ministers; because this destroys the very end of parliament as a control, and is a general precious sanction to misgovernment: And, secondly, the setting up any claims adverse to the right of free election."

Of its indiscriminate support of ministers, the present Congress has given ample evidence. Has it set up any claims adverse to the right of free elections? Yes, in Letcher's case, described point by point, in the following passage :—

"In the last session, the corps, called the King's friends, made an hardy attempt, all at once, to alter the right of election itself; to put it into the power of the house of commons to disable any person disagreeable to them from sitting in parliament, without any other rule than their own pleasure; to make incapacities, either general for descriptions of men, or particular for individuals; and to take into their body persons who avowedly had never been chosen by the majority of legal electors, nor agreeably to any known rule of law."

We remark only, in conclusion, that all these extracts are, of course, made without any addition or change of words, and without any omission, except when it is expressly noted; and in those cases, the sense remains the same as in the original text. C.

352

THE STORY TELLER.

ΝΟ. Ι.

AT HOME.

FROM infancy, I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes, using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been very different in their cases and mine; they being all respectable men, and well settled in life, the eldest as the successor to his father's pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a wholesale shoe store; while I, with better prospects than either of them, have run the course, which this volume will describe. Yet there is room for doubt, whether I should have been any better contented with such success as theirs, than with my own misfortunes; at least, till after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another trial.

My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the place it occupies in ecclesiastical history, than for so frivolous a page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his pulpit furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones, would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such pounding and expounding, the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body, while delivering his sermons, could have supported the good parson's health under the mental toil, which they cost him in composition.

Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose, to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be tinctured with generosity, I acknowledge him to have been a good and a wise man, after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself, it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any mode of education, with which it was possible for him to be acquainted, have made me much better than what I was, or led me to a happier fortune than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me, nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for parents have an instinctive sagacity, in regard to the welfare of their children; and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and affection of his parents, which he cannot transfer to any delegate of their duties, however conscientious. An orphan's fate is hard, be he rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old gentleman in my dreams, he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding out his hand, as if each had

something to forgive. With such kindness, and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!

I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and fanciful. What a character was this, to be brought in con tact with the stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, any where in the world; it was fatal, in New-England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent, in its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as if it ranked me with the tavernhaunters and town-paupers, with the drunken poet, who hawked his own fourth of July odes,-and the broken soldier, who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence of all this, was a piece of light-hearted desperation.

I do not over-estimate my notoriety, when I take it for granted, that many of my readers must have heard of me, in the wild way of life which I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story teller had been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry vagabonds in a showman's wagon, where they and I had sheltered ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every day; and not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere; of Goldsmith, who planned and performed his travels through France and Italy, on a less promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking. Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives were discontent with home, and a bitter grudge against Parson Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father's tomb, than seen me either a novelist or an actor; two characters which I thus hit upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I had written romances, instead of reciting them.

The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life, intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty, wherever chance had collected a little audience, idle enough to listen. These 45

VOL. VII.

rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly, that its indulgence was its own reward; though the hope of praise, also, became a powerful incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought, as I did then, let me beseech the reader to believe, that my tales were not always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it is the experience of a wandering story teller.

A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.

I SET out on my rambles one morning in June, about sunrise. The day promised to be fair, though, at that early hour, a heavy mist lay along the earth, and settled, in minute globules, on the folds of my clothes, so that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible, till they grew out of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a hill towards the west, whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course through the village, and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind which it disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I paused, and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and swept away, with so sudden an effect, that a gray cloud seemed to have taken the aspect of a small white town. A thin vapor being still diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog, whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial than the edifices, and gave their own indistinctness to the whole. It was singular, that such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.

Half of the parson's dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it was a cloud; But Squire Moody's mansion, the grandest in the village, was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the front window; while, in another place, only two red chimneys were seen above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence, then tenanted by strangers. I could not remember those with whom I had dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-good store of Mr. Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike's tobacco-manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian chief in front. The white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy base were its only support; or, to give a truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem of religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to a cloudless atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on its gilded vane.

As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals and a border of trees between the wheel-track and the side-walks, all