“Other parts of America,” says de Segur, in commencing his description with his best bow and gracious compliment, as if addressing himself to the incomparable Lawton-" were only beautiful by anticipation; but the prosperity of Rhode Island was already complete. . . . Newport, well and regularly built, contained a numerous population, whose happiness was indicated by its prosperity. It offered delightful circles, composed of enlightened men and modest and handsome women, whose talents heightened their personal attractions. All the French officers who knew them recollect the names and beauty of Miss Champlin, the two Misses Hunter, and sev-in Philadelphia in 1797-8, says, quietly: "The eral others." He also saw "the silent, serious old man" of de Broglie, who very seldom bared his thoughts, and never bared his head;" but he confesses that the first interview would have

"In

fine," he says, "the people of Rhode Island are the most ignorant of all the Americans."

the men worked zealously, and the flames were | lates upon the reasons of the poverty of the islsubdued. 46 This spectacle consoled me," adds and. The ingenious Frenchman attributes it to Brissot, "and I thought that virtue was not en- many causes-the neighborhood of the sea, which tirely extinguished in this people." This amus- tempts the inhabitants to navigation-the want ing and sudden conclusion reveals the character of a market-the want of trees of all kinds-the of his mind, and the value of his impressions. constant elections taking the people from their He immediately begins to find other proofs of re-work-the ignorant style of cultivation. maining virtue. We learn that "there are no thefts, nor murders, nor even begging...... the American does not beg nor steal." This is more encouraging; and although he complains of the contrary wind which detained him six days at Newport, and he found his companions at the tavern very disagreeable, yet he went to hear a famous Universalist, Dr. Murray, who preached in the Court-house, and there he saw "pretty women, with immense bonnets, fashionably made, and well dressed; which surprised me, for until then I had seen only hideous women and rags." This is a valuable confession. It shows that Jean Pierre Brissot, Citoyen Français, did not penetrate that society to which de Broglie, Lauzun, Rochambeau, Segur, de Vauban, and the rest, were welcome guests, and which now held itself retired, its days of feasting ended, its great mansions ruined, and its fortunes dilapidated, although it was still handsome, and well-dressed, and wore fashionable bonnets. Brissot's sketch of the general appearance of the town is perhaps too darkly colored, but it is very interesting; and there can be little doubt that its ruin was a sadder spectacle to the ladies in fashionable bonnets who remembered its perished splendors, than to the vivacious and uneasy traveler.

The tone of Brissot's book is supported by La RochefoucaultLiancourt, who came to Newport from "Newbedfort," in 1795. He had letters to Samuel Elam, whom we have already noticed as the builder of Vaucluse, the sole proprietor upon the island "who did not work with his own hands," "the best of Quakers, and the best of men." He alone, at the time of Liancourt's visit, maintained the former glory of Newport life. Vaucluse was evidently the model-farm of the island. His fellow-farmers had few barns, and the Frenchman remarks the great number of haystacks dispersed all over the island which at the present time also, are charac

teristic objects in the landscape. He describes the island as a succession of meadows and corn-fields. Barley is raised also, he says, in great quantities, to supply the breweries of New York and Philadelphia. He bewails the fine orchards and ornamental trees leveled by the British, and the poorly cultivated sandy fields. The farms he found to be usually of seventy acres, few so large as two hundred, and two or three only had four hundred He speaks with pleasure of the Newport cheeses, famous throughout America, and specu

acres.

With this conclusion he arrives in the town of Newport. It was already reduced to four thousand inhabitants, although Bishop Berkeley, sixty years before, had found six thousand. Its commerce had dwindled to some twelve vessels in the European trade, two or three in the Guinea and Georgia slave-trade, and some fifty or sixty in the domestic and coast-trade. In 1791, the exports amounted to $217,394; in 1795, to $317,860. The houses of Newport, the homes of the beautiful Redwoods, Champlins, Hunters, Lawtons, Malbones, and the rest of the old colonial nobility, the remorseless Frenchman finds small, shabby, and unpainted. Every where are signs of decay. Religion is tolerant. Quakers and Anabaptists are most numerous; "but the people are not religious." The residents upon the island, the small Quaker farmers, come to church in Newport only four times a year, says Rochefoucault. It is an obstinate, litigious, and lazy people." A year or two afterward he passed by Newport once more, and says:

66

SPOUTING ROCK.

"I saw again with pleasure, not the sad and ruined town, but its charming environs. . . The health of the place is due, doubtless, to the air; but it is remarkable how many young girls die of lung complaints. The tombstones commemorate very young or very old people-few between twenty and seventy."

These were the years of stagnation. Newport had ceased to be a gay and busy metropolis; but it was full of the evidences of recent ruin, and had not yet begun to settle into its present quiet

state of quaint and pensive decay. But during the most interesting on earth. I believe it is unithe last days of its prosperity it was the birth-versally acknowledged to be the most beautiful place of its most illustrious child, and one of the greatest men of his country, the influence of whose pure and noble mind, sweet catholicity of sympathy, and unshrinking heroism of temper, upon the intellectual and moral life of America is incalculable.

William Ellery Channing was born in Newport on the 7th of April, 1780, in the house at the corner of Mary and High streets, and about a year before the visit of General Washington to Count Rochambeau. His father was AttorneyGeneral of the State, and was a lawyer of consideration. He married, in 1773, the daughter of William Ellery, one of the old names of Newport, and one of the signers, for Rhode Island, of the Declaration of Independence. "I must bless God for the place of my nativity," said Dr. Channing in 1836. Yet it was declining from the time of his birth. The tone of general society had not been improved by the war. The West . India trade continued, and the habits of a sea-port encourage a laxity of manners and morals, from which the old sea-captains and heavy retired merchants were not free. Profanity and intemperance were the chief vices of the time. "I can recollect," he says, "a corruption of morals among those of my own age, which made boyhood a critical, perilous season;" yet "amidst this glorious nature . . . I early received impressions of the great and the beautiful, which I believe have had no small influence in determining my modes of thought and habits of life. I had no professor or teacher to guide me; but I had two noble places of study-one was yonder beautiful edifice (the Redwood Library), now so frequented and so useful as a public library; then so deserted, that I spent day after day, and sometimes week after week, amidst its dusty volumes, without interruption from a single visitor. The other place was yonder beach, the roar of which has so often mingled with the worship of this place, my daily resort, dear to me in the sunshine, still more attractive in the storm." This was the homage which a great man paid to his birth-place, as he stood, in the fullness of his fame, among its familiar scenes, and said: "The generation which I then knew has almost wholly disappeared." He went to the school of Robert Rogers, then the best in the State. There were many scholars from the South, and among them Washington Allston, who afterward married Channing's sister. But at twelve years of age he left Newport to go to school in New London. He was destined to the medical profession by his father; but soon after he graduated at Harvard College, the young man selected the ministry as his profession, and resided in Boston, as pastor of the Federal Street Unitarian Church, until his death, at Bennington, Vermont, in October, 1842, in his sixty-third year. He constantly returned to Newport, and always with fresh interest and pleasure. Writing, in August, 1832, to Joanna Baillie, he says of it-" A spot, of which I suppose you have never heard, but which is to me

place in our whole range of sea-coast. . . . Its surface reminds me more of the gentle, graceful slopes of your country than any scene I have visited in America; and its climate is more English, being quite humid, though affording us often those bright skies of which you see so few in England. . . . In natural beauty, my island does not seem to me inferior to the Isle of Wight. In cultivation it will bear no comparison." "I am still at this paradise," he says to another friend. His residence in Newport was upon the island, about five miles from town, and he sometimes, though rarely, preached in the little wooden church near Durfee's Tea-house.

CHANNING HOUSE.*

It was at Robert Rogers' school in Newport that Dr. Channing became acquainted with Washington Allston, whose name is thus associated with the island by his early school history. His only picture now on the island is the Jeremiah, at Miss Gibbs', in Portsmouth. Allston speaks fondly and with admiration of his future brother-in-law, and also of Edward G. Malbone, the miniature painter, who must have been a boy there with Channing, although the latter does not mention him in any published letter. Allston, indeed, only made the acquaintance of Malbone a little before the latter left his birth-place to seek his fortune. Malbone went to another school.

This eminent artist, quite unsurpassed in his department, was born in Newport in 1777. His development began while he was very young, for the favor of the gods toward those they love is early visible, and explains why they die young. The boy began to visit the theatre, fascinated by the brilliant mystery of the stage and the scenery, and at length reached the perilous honor of painting a scene. The theatre was in the upper part of the present market-house, at the corner of Long Wharf and the Parade. He delighted in blowing bubbles; in taking toys to pieces to ascertain their mechanism, that he might imitate them; and flew kites at night, with trailing splendors of

*This is not the house in which Channing was born. He lived here, however, when a child.

fire-works, exploding and flashing among the | be a gallery of many of the most famous and beaustars, to his great glee and that of his companions. tiful women of the society of the early part of His taste for drawing and painting was not en- the century. "No woman ever lost any beauty tirely cherished by his father; and at seventeen, from his hand," says Allston, in the same breath the young man threw himself upon his talent, with which he praises the fidelity of the likeness. went to Providence, and began to paint minia- He added a grace of execution all his own." tures. In 1796, he went to Boston, and cement- His pictures have a breadth which is not injured ed his friendship with Allston, then at Harvard by their size. They are full of a sensitive sweetCollege, and the friends passed the summer of. ness, which is sure to interest the observer, who 1800 in Newport together. In the autumn they may know nothing of the originals. In an unwent to Charleston, and in May, 1801, sailed in finished portrait by him, in the possession of company for England. While in London, Mal- Mrs. M. B. Ives, of Providence, the same characbone painted his most famous picture. "I am teristics are apparent; indicated not less in the painting one now," he writes at that time, graceful, pensive bit of summer landscape, which "which I shall bring with me. It is the Hours: makes the background of the picture, than in the the past, the present, and the coming.'" Shelly, rare sense of maidenly character, which, as in the most eminent miniature painter of that day in Overbeck's drawings of the Madonna, seems to England, had painted a picture of the same sub- have restrained the artist's hand, lest he should ject and with the same title, from which a print draw the lines too grossly. Among the names has been published. Mr. Fraser says, according whose association with Newport enhances the to Dunlap, that Malbone told him that the idea historical interest of the island, that of Malbone was suggested to him by a picture of Shelly's; will always be pleasantly remembered. and Malbone's sister, Mrs. Whitehorne, says, in a fames of Allston, Stuart, and Malbone, each most letter to Dunlap, "I have heard him say that he eminent in his department, among our artists, selected two figures (and don't recollect from all belong to the story of Rhode Island, if the where they were taken), added a third, grouped fact of birth and the influences of early childhood them, and designed The Hours.'" Whatever constitute a claim. the origin of the picture, its execution is exquisite. The fresh, clear, sweet color; the tender, feminine character of the heads, which have all the peculiar conventional beauty of the time-the same kind of beauty that appears in many of Stuart's and Stuart Newton's heads-are as lovely now as ever. The picture is very small-it is in the miniature style, which was his most successful manner and still remains in the possession of his family, from whom an effort is now making to purchase it, and place it permanently in the Providence Athenæum. It would surely be a matter of regret, that the best work of our best painter, in his kind, should not be retained in his native State.

The

About the commencement of the century Newport began to revive a little from the total stagnation which followed the war. But it revived only to a quiet and moderate activity. The Fort, upon the Dumpling Rocks upon Conanicut Island, one of the most picturesque objects around the town, was erected under the elder Adams, but never used. There is no pleasanter excursion than an afternoon's sail across the harbor to these solitary rocks and the ruined fort.

The distilleries began again as general prosperity returned to the country. "Then was heard from Fort Walcott," says an ecstatic and romantic chronicler, "the beat of the reveillé, warbling its sweetest notes along the shore, by those inimiMalbone returned to America in 1802, and table and graceful performers the Hoopers, Mullipainted with great success in all the sea-board gin," &c. "Sam Place's hack," too, began to cities. In the summer he was again at Newport, be in demand, and rattled parties over the island, and was constantly employed. He worked with eager to taste " Aunt Hannah Cornell's shovelunremitting devotion. In 1805, he received $50 cakes." Aunt Hannah made her cakes in the a head, which was considered a good price for house which stood upon the present site of Lawthe times. But in March, 1806, he began to fail. ton's Tea-house. Shovel-cakes are still to be He remained at the South until the warm weath- had by a hungry later generation, and the " grider, when he returned to Newport, and laid aside dles" of Mrs. Durfee, in the Tea-house at the his pencil altogether, hoping, in riding and sport- Glen," shall not want a historian, as they have ing, to regain his lost health. But one day, in not wanted troops of lovers. The Glen is one running and stooping for a bird which he had of the favorite drives, and Mrs. Durfee is the shot, he was seized with a violent hemorrhage. goddess of the Glen. It is a romantic dell, windThe end was near, but the young man submitted ing down through woods to the water, upon the gently to every thing that care and skill suggest-eastern shore of the island. Across the channel ed. He sailed for Jamaica in 1806; but still failing, and longing once more to see his native shores, he turned homeward, but died in Savannah in 1807, in his thirtieth year.

Allston and all his friends loved him. "I look ed up to him with admiration," says Allston, of their Newport days. His works, which are mainly miniatures, are very generally diffused through the Atlantic States. A collection of them would

the little town of Compton-on-the-hill lies white upon the shore; but the place is mainly pleasant because it has the rarest rural beauty of the island -trees. It was formerly called Cundall's Mills, from the fulling-mill of Joseph Cundall, which stood upon the site of the present stone factory.

During the commencement of the century Newport was gradually acquiring its present character of grave respectability and decayed