It's the folks thet air kind o' brought up to depend on 't

Thet hev any consarn in 't, an' thet is the end on 't.

Now here wuz New England abevin' the honor

Of a chance at the Speakership showered
upon her;
Do you say, "She don't want no more
Speakers, but fewer;

She's hed plenty o' them, wut she wants is a doer " ?

Fer the matter o' thet, it's notorous in town Thet her own representatives du her quite brown.

But thet's nothin' to du with it; wut right hed Palfrey

To mix himself up with fanatical small fry?

Warn't we gittin' on prime with our hot an' cold blowin',

Acondemnin' the war wilst we kep' it agoin'?

We'd assumed with gret skill a commandin' position,

On this side or thet, no one could n't tell

wich one,

So, wutever side wipped, we'd a chance at the plunder

An' could sue fer infringin' our paytented

thunder;

We were ready to vote fer whoever wuz

eligible,

Ef on all pints at issoo he'd stay unintelli

gible.

Wal, sposin' we hed to gulp down our perfessions,

We were ready to come out next mornin' with fresh ones;

Besides, ef we did, 't was our business alone, Fer could n't we du wut we would with our own?

An' ef a man can, wen pervisions hev riz so, Eat up his own words, it's a marcy it is so. Wy, these chaps frum the North, with backbones to 'em, darn 'em,

'Ould be wuth more 'an Gennle Tom Thumb is to Barnum:

Ther's enough thet to office on this very

plan grow,

By exhibitin' how very small a man can

grow;

But an M. C. frum here ollers hastens to

state he

Belongs to the order called invertebraty,

Wence some gret filologists judge primy fashy

Thet M. C. is M. T. by paronomashy;
An' these few exceptions air loosus naytury
Folks 'ould put down their quarters to stare
at, like fury.

It's no use to open the door o' success,
Ef a member can bolt so fer nothin' or less;
Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers
Our fore-fathers fetched with 'em over the
billers,

Them pillers the people so soundly hev slep' on,

Wile to slav'ry, invasion, an' debt they were swep' on,

Wile our Destiny higher an' higher kep' mountin'

(Though I guess folks 'll stare wen she hends her account in),

Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em, They wunt hev so much ez a feather left in 'em.

Who is it dares say thet our naytional eagle

Wun't much longer be classed with the birds thet air regal,

Coz theirn be hooked beaks, an' she, arter this slaughter,

'll bring back a bill ten times longer 'n she'd ough' to? Wut 's your name?

Come, I see ye, you

up-country feller, You 've put me out severil times with your beller;

Out with it! Wut? Biglow? I say nothin' furder,

Thet feller would like nothin' better 'n a murder;

He's a traiter, blasphemer, an' wut ruther worse is,

He puts all his ath'ism in dreffle bad verses; Socity aint safe till sech monsters air out on it,

Refer to the Post, ef you hev the least doubt on it;

Wy, he goes agin war, agin indirect taxes, Agin sellin' wild lands 'cept to settlers

with axes,

1 Jortin is willing to allow of other miracles besides those recorded in Holy Writ, and why not of other prophecies? It is granting too much to Satan to suppose him, as divers of the learned have done, the inspirer of the ancient oracles. Wiser, I esteem it, to give chance the credit of the successful ones. What is said here of Louis Philippe was verified in some of its minute particulars within a few months' time. Enough to have made the fortune of Delphi or Hammon, and

[Into the question whether the ability to express ourselves in articulate language has been productive of more good or evil, I shall not here enter at large. The two faculties of speech and of speech-making are wholly diverse in their natures. By the first we make ourselves intelligible, by the last unintelligible, to our fellows. It has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description driven by milk-and-water power. I cannot conceive the confusion of tongues to have been the curse of Babel, since I esteem my ignorance of other languages as a kind of Martello-tower, in which I am safe from the furious bombardments of foreign garrulity. For this reason I have ever preferred the study of the dead languages, those primitive formations being Ararats upon whose silent peaks I sit secure and watch this new deluge without fear, though it rain figures (simulacra, semblances) of speech no thanks to Beelzebub neither! That of Seneca in Medea will suit here:

"Ranida fortuna ac levis Præcepsque regno eripuit, exsilio dedit."

Let us allow, even to richly deserved misfortune, our commiseration, and be not over-hasty meanwhile in our censure of the French people, left for the first time to govern themselves, remembering that wise sentence of Eschylus,

Απας δὲ τραχὺς ὅστις ἂν νέον κρατῇ. - Η. W.

forty days and nights together, as it not uncommonly happens. Thus is my coat, as it were, without buttons by which any but a vernacular wild bore can seize me. Is it not possible that the Shakers may intend to convey a quiet reproof and hint, in fastening their outer garments with hooks and eyes?

This reflection concerning Babel, which I find in no Commentary, was first thrown upon my mind when an excellent deacon of my congregation (being infected with the Second Advent delusion) assured me that he had received a first instalment of the gift of tongues as a small earnest of larger possessions in the like kind to follow. For, of a truth, I could not reconcile it with my ideas of the Divine justice and mercy that the single wall which protected people of other languages from the incursions of this otherwise well-meaning propagandist should be broken down.

In reading Congressional debates, I have fancied, that, after the subsidence of those painful buzzings in the brain which result from such exercises, I detected a slender residuum of valuable information. I made the discovery that nothing takes longer in the saying than anything else, for as ex nihilo nihil fit, so from one polypus nothing any number of similar ones may be produced. I would recommend to the attention of viva voce debaters and controversialists the admirable example of the monk Copres, who, in the fourth century, stood for half an hour in the midst of a great fire, and thereby silenced a Manichæan antagonist who had less of the salamander in him. As for those who quarrel in print, I have no concern with them here, since the eyelids are a divinely granted shield against all such. Moreover, I have observed in many modern books that the printed portion is becoming gradually smaller, and the number of blank or fly-leaves (as they are called) greater. Should this fortunate tendency of literature continue, books will grow more valuable from year to year, and the whole Serbonian bog yield to the advances of firm arable land.

The sagacious Lacedæmonians, hearing that Tesephone had bragged that he could talk all day long on any given subject, made no more ado, but forthwith banished him, whereby they supplied him a topic and at the same time took care that his experiment upon it should be tried out of earshot.

I have wondered, in the Representatives' Chamber of our own Commonwealth, to mark how little impression seemed to be produced by that emblematic fish suspended over the heads of the members. Our wiser ancestors, no doubt, hung it there as being the animal which the Pythagoreans reverenced for its silence, and which certainly in that particular does not so well merit the epithet cold-blooded, by which naturalists distinguish it, as certain bipeds, afflicted with ditch-water on the brain, who take occasion to tap themselves in Faneuil Halls, meeting-honses, and other places of public resort.-H. W.]

No. V

THE DEBATE IN THE SENNIT

SOT TO A NUSRY RHYME

[THE incident which gave rise to the debate satirized in the following verses was the unsuccessful attempt of Drayton and Sayres to give freedom to seventy men and women, fellowbeings and fellow-Christians. Had Tripoli, instead of Washington, been the scene of this undertaking, the unhappy leaders in it would have been as secure of the theoretic as they now are of the practical part of martyrdom. I question whether the Dey of Tripoli is blessed with a District Attorney so benighted as ours at the seat of government. Very fitly is he named Key, who would allow himself to be made the instrument of locking the door of hope against sufferers in such a cause. Not all the waters of the ocean can cleanse the vile smutch of the jailer's fingers from off that little Key. Ahenea clavis, a brazen Key indeed!

Mr. Calhoun, who is made the chief speaker in this burlesque, seems to think that the light of the nineteenth century is to be put out as soon as he tinkles his little cow-bell curfew. Whenever slavery is touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolving the Union. This may do for the North, but I should conjecture that something more than a pumpkin-lantern is required to scare manifest and irretrievable Destiny out of her path. Mr. Calhoun cannot let go the apron-string of the Past. The Past is a good nurse, but we must be weaned from her sooner or later, even though, like Plotinus, we should run home from school to ask the breast, after we are tolerably well-grown youths. It will not do for us to hide our faces in her lap, whenever the strange Future holds out her arms and asks us to come to her.

But we are all alike. We have all heard it said, often enough, that little boys must not play with fire; and yet, if the matches be taken away from us, and put out of reach upon the shelf, we must needs gets into our little corner, and scowl and stamp and threaten the dire revenge of going to bed without our supper. The world shall stop till we get our dangerous plaything again. Dame Earth, meanwhile, who has more than enough household matters to mind, goes bustling hither and thither as a hiss or a sputter tells her that this or that kettle of hers is boiling over, and before bedtime we are glad to eat our porridge cold, and gulp down our dignity along with it.

Mr. Calhoun has somehow acquired the name of a great statesman, and, if it be great statesmanship to put lance in rest and run a tilt at the Spirit of the Age with the certainty of being next moment hurled neck and heels into the dust amid universal langhter, he deserves the title. He is the Sir Kay of our modern chivalry. He should remember the old Scandinavian mythus. Thor was the strongest of

gods, but he could not wrestle with Time, nor so much as lift up a fold of the great snake which bound the universe together; and when he smote the Earth, though with his terrible mallet, it was but as if a leaf had fallen. Yet all the while it seemed to Thor that he had only been wrestling with an old woman, striving to lift a cat, and striking a stupid giant on the head.

And in old times, doubtless, the giants were stupid, and there was no better sport for the Sir Launcelots and Sir Gawains than to go about cutting off their great blundering heads with enchanted swords. But things have wonderfully changed. It is the giants, nowadays, that have the science and the intelligence, while the chivalrous Don Quixotes of Conservatism still cumber themselves with the clumsy armor of a bygone age. On whirls the restless globe through unsounded time, with its cities and its silences, its births and funerals, half light, half shade, but never wholly dark, and sure to swing round into the happy morning at last. With an involuntary smile, one sees Mr. Calhoun letting slip his pack-thread cable with a crooked pin at the end of it to anchor South Carolina upon the bank and shoal of the Past.-H. W.]

TO MR. BUCKENAM

MR. EDITER, As i wuz kinder prunin round in a little nussry sot out a year or 2 the Dbait in the sennit cum inter my a go, mine An so i took & Sot it to wut I call a nussry rime. I hev made sum onnable Gentlemun speak thut dident speak in a Kind uv Poetikul lie sense the seeson is dreffle backerd up This way

ewers as ushul

HOSEA BIGLOW.

"HERE we stan' on the Constitution, by thunder!

It's a fact o' wich ther's bushils o' proofs;

Fer how could we trample on 't so, I wonder,

Ef 't worn't thet it's ollers under our

hoofs ?"

Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he;

"Human rights haint no more Right to come on this floor,

No more 'n the man in the moon," sez he.

The North haint no kind o' bisness with nothin',

An' you've no idee how much bother it

saves;

"Freedom's Keystone is Slavery, thet ther 's no doubt on,

It's sutthin' thet 's- wha' d' ye call it ? — divine, –

An' the slaves thet we ollers make the most out on

Air them north o' Mason an' Dixon's line,"

Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he; —

"Fer all that," sez Mangum,

"'T would be better to hang 'em An' so git red on 'em soon," sez he.

"The mass ough' to labor an' we lay on soffies,

Thet's the reason I want to spread Freedom's aree;

It puts all the cunninest on us in office, An' reelises our Maker's orig'nal idee," Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he;

"Thet's ez plain," sez Cass,

"Ez thet some one's an ass, It's ez clear ez the sun is at noon," sez he.

[It was said of old time, that riches have wings; and, though this be not applicable in a literal strictness to the wealth of our patriarchal brethren of the South, yet it is clear that their possessions have legs, and an unaccountable propensity for using them in a northerly direction. I marvel that the grand jury of Washington did not find a true bill against the North Star for aiding and abetting Drayton and Sayres. It would have been quite of a piece with the intelligence displayed by the South on other questions connected with slavery. I think that no ship of state was ever freighted with a more veritable Jonah than this same domestic institution of ours. Mephistopheles himself could not feign so bitterly, so satirically sad a sight as this of three millions of human beings crushed beyond help or hope by this one mighty argument, Our fathers knew no better! Nevertheless, it is the unavoidable destiny of Jonahs to be cast overboard sooner or later. Or shall we try the experiment of hiding our Jonah in a safe place, that none may lay hands on him to make jetsam of him? Let us, then, with equal forethought and wisdom, lash ourselves to the anchor, and await, in pious confidence, the certain result. Perhaps our suspicious passenger is no Jonah after all, being black. For it is well known that a superintending Providence made