original sources of information. Some three hundred pages of the "History" are thus occupied with the fortunes of the Napoleon dynasty. One of the most noteworthy of the American topics discussed is the defence of the system of privateering which has been since substantially set forth by President Pierce, in his Message of 1854. There are also, among other personal anecdotes, some animated descriptions of Washington and of Jefferson.

Mr. Ingersoll is at present engaged on a History of the Territorial Acquisitions of the United States.

Joseph Reed Ingersoll, the brother of Charles J. Ingersoll, a distinguished lawyer, for many years a prominent Whig in the House of Representatives, is the author of a translation of Roccus's treatise De Navibus et Nauto, of an address delivered in 1837 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Bowdoin College on The Advantages of Science and Literature, which attracted much attention, and of several other discourses of a similar character.

Edward, a third brother of the same family, wrote poems on the times entitled Horace in Philadelphia, which appeared in the Port Folio, and was a writer on political subjects in Walsh's Gazette.

BOOK-MAKING TRAVELLERS IN AMERICA-FROM THE INCHIQUIN LETTERS.

The labors of this class of writing travellers in America have been seconded by those of another, who, as their writings are confined to bills of exchange and accounts current, have contented themselves with being oral haberdashers of small stories, and retailers of ribaldry. Swarms of noxious insects swept from the factories and spunging-houses of Europe, after enjoying a full harvest of emolument and importance in the cities of this country, return to their original insignificance at home, to buzz assertions through their "little platoons of society," and then come back again to bask in the sunshine they feign to slight. Apprentices and understrappers, mongrel abbés and gens d'industrie, in the course of their flight over the Atlantic, are transmuted into fine gentlemen and virtuosi, shocked at the barbarian customs of this savage republic; the hospitality of whose citizens they condescend to accept, while they commiserate and calumniate their hosts, and consider it their especial errand and office to vilify, disturb, and overturn the government. The time was when these sturdy beggars walked without knocking into every door, taking the chief seats in the synagogue, and the uppermost rooms at feasts, devouring widows' houses, reviling with impunity the food they fed on. But so many ludicrous and so many serious explosions have gone off of these transatlantic bubbles, so many individuals have been put to shame, so many respectable families to ruin, by their polluting contact, that the delusion is broke, and they begin to be seen in their essential hideousness. Persons of condition from abroad have so often proved to be hostlers and footmen, and men of learning mountebank doctors, that the Americans find it necessary to shake these foreign vermin from their skirts, and to assert a dignity and self-respect, which are the first steps to that consideration from others, hitherto by this excrescent usurpation repelled from their society. Hic nigræ succus loliginis, hæc est

Erugo mera

was my fortune to be assorted at every meal with half a dozen agents from the manufacturing towns of England, some Frenchmen exiled from St. Domingo, a Dutch supercargo, a Chinese mandarin—as a caitiff from Canton entitled himself-the young Greek, a copy of one of whose letters I sent you some time ago, and a countryman of mine; all of whom, after a plentiful regale, and drinking each other's healths till their brains were addled with strong liquors, would almost every day chime into a general execration of the fare, climate, customs, people, and institutions of this nether region. One of the Englishmen, a native of Cornwall, who was never out of a mist in his life till he left the parish of his birth, complained of the variableness of the weather, another of the beef, and a third of the porter, alleviations, without which they pronounced existence insupportable, taking care to accompany their complaints with magnificent eulogiums on the clear sky, cheap living, and other equally unquestionable advantages of their own country, with occasional intimations thrown in of their personal importance at home. The Creole French, in a bastard dialect, declaimed at the dishonesty and fickleness of the Americans, the demureness of their manners, and provoking irregularity of the language; winding up their philippic with a rapturous recollection of the charms of Paris; where in all probability no one of them ever was, except to obtain passports for leaving the kingdom.

They talk of beauties that they never saw,
And fancy raptures that they never knew.

The Chinese, who never was free from a sweat till he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and who, when in Canton, never forgot in his prayers to implore the blessings of a famine or pestilence, catching the contagion of the company, and mechanically imitative, though he could not speak so as to be understood, endeavored, by signs and shrugs, to show that he suffered from the heat, and gave us to understand that an annual plague must be inevitable in such a climate. The Irishman, who swallowed two bottles of claret with a meal, besides brandy and malt liquors, swore the intemperate weather gave him fevers. The Hollander smoked his phlegmatic pipe in silence, looking approbation; and the complying Greek nodded assent, while at table, to every syllable that was uttered, though he afterwards coincided with me in a contradiction of the whole. When I was formerly in America, I knew several foreigners, then well stricken in years, who had resided here since the peace of 1783, always grumbling over the privations of this country, and sighing as usual; but fat and satisfied, and indulging not the least expectation of ever exchanging their forlorn state here for their brilliant prospects elsewhere. Like a well-fed curate, they dwell for ever on the fascinations of futurity, as contrasted with the wretchedness of mortality, recommending all good men to hasten from the one to the other, but without any wish for themselves to leave this world of tribulation.

LEWIS CASS.

Dewbap.

LEWIS CASS, the son of Jonathan Cass, a soldier of the Revolution, was born at Exeter, New Hamp

of Daniel Webster. At the age of seventeen, after having received an ordinary English education in his native place, he crossed the Alleghanies on foot and settled in Marietta, Ohio. In 1807 he was elected a member of the state legislature, where he introduced a bill which led to the arrest of Colonel Burr and the defeat of his plans. He was appointed about the same time Marshal of the State by Jefferson, an office which he resigned in 1811 to take part as a volunteer to repel the attacks of the Indians on the northern frontier. In 1812 he entered the United States army. He served with distinction at Detroit, and afterwards at the Battle of the Thames, and was appointed Governor of the territory of Michigan in 1813 by Madison, a position which he held until his appointment as Secretary of War by Gener:l Jackson in 1831. In this period, in 1819 and 1820, he projected and was engaged in carrying into effect a scientific exploration of the upper region of the Mississippi, which has identified his name permanently with the geography of the country. In 1836 he was appointed Minister to France, where he rendered important service in opposing the admission of the right of search in the quintuple treaty for the suppression of the Slave Trade. In consequence of opposition to the treaty made with Great Britain on this subject in 1842, which he regarded as involving his official position, he requested a recall and returned home. He published, in 1840, a volume entitled France, its King, Court, and Governme it, of historic interest for its sketch of the travels of Louis Philippe in America, which the minister had listened to from the lips of the royal adventurer at the Tuileries. Mr. Cass also contributed to the Southern Literary Messenger several papers on Candia and Cyprus. In 1845 he was elected United States Senator from Michigan, but resigned his seat in May on his nomination as the candidate of the Democratic party for the Presidency. After the election of General Taylor he was in 1849 reelected to the Senate for the unexpired portion of his terin, and still remains a member of that body. In 1848 he delivered an address before the New England Society of Michigan at Detroit, which was published at the time. In this eloquent discourse he thus contra-ts the past of the old world with the present and future of America.

The hardy emigrant is ascending the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and already the forest is giving way before the axe of the woodsman on the very shores that look out upon China and Japan. In many portions of the old world, and in the oldest too, time has done its work. History has closed its record. Their high places have a world-renown in human annals, but they are solitudes. The pilgrim from other lands may go up to visit them, but it is for what they have been, and not for what they are. It is not to survey a prosperous country and a happy people; but to meditate upon the instability of human power, where the foundations of power were the deepest and the broadest. I have seen the wandering Arab, the descendant of Ishmael, sitting upon the ruins of Baalbeck, himself a ruin, not less marked and melancholy than they. Think you that visions of far away splendor passed before his eyes, and shut out the prospect of that wretchedness, which has bowed down his race for centuries? Think you that such dreams, waking though they may be, can give

green pastures and rich flocks and herds, as in the days of the Patriarch? No, it is better to look round on prosperity than back on glory. The events of ages elsewhere seem here to be compressed within the ordinary life of man. Our birth is of yesterday; our growth of to-day. We have no past. No monuments, that have come down to us, glorious in their ruins, telling the story of former magnificence in the very solitude, that tells the story of present decay. Sometimes the shadows of bygone days pass over me, and I awake as from a dream, asking myself, is this great country, north of the Ohio and west of these brond Lakes, teeming with life, liberty, and prosperity; is this the country I entered half a century ago, shut out from the light of heaven by the primitive forests that covered it? Is this the country, which then contained one territory, and which now contains five States of this Union; whose population then numbered a few thousands, and now ing towns, animated with the busy hum of industry, numbers five millions of people? And these flourishwhere they are, can I have slept under gigantio trees, throwing their broad branches over an unbroken soil? And the railroad, does it follow the war path, where I have followed the Indian? And the church bell, which summons a Christian community to prayer and to praise in the house of God, how brief the interval, since the solitude was broken by the war drum and the war song? We are realizing the fictions of Eastern imagination, and a better genius than him of Aladdin's lamp, the genius of industry and enterprise, is doing that mighty work, whose ultimate issue it is not given to human sagacity to foretell.

Thamas to Benton,

Nashville, Tenn. Following the example of his family, both on the father's and mother's side, who had been active in the promotion of western emigration, he soon afterwards removed to Missouri, where, in 1820, he was elected one of her first United States Senators. In the interval of a year between his election and the admission of the state, he devoted himself to the study of the Spanish language, and to a preparation for the vigorous fulfilment of his duties. He took his seat in the Senate August 10, 1821, and retained it, by constant re-election, for the long period of thirty years, during which he took a leading part in the discus-ion of the great questions which came before that body, and was especially prominent in the debates on the United States Bank and the Sub-Treasury, being a warm friend of the latter measure.

Colonel Benton's moderate course on the slavery question not being approved by the majority of the Senate of his state, and his independent course on other questions as well having added to the number of his enemies as well as his friends, he lost his election to the Senate in 1851. He offered himself at the next popular election as a candidate for the House of Representatives, and was successful. In 1854 he was, however, defeated-members of the Democratic party having united with and elected the candidate of the Whigs. In 1853 Colonel Benton published the first volume of his autobiographic work, Thirty Years' View; or a History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850. The thirty years is the period of Mr. Benton's senatorship, extending from the Presidency of Madison to that of Fillmore. The plan of the work, giving to a great mass of material, simplicity and clearness, is simply to treat in chronological order, in one view, the leading epochs of each question, connecting it with some memorable personage or crisis of debate. This is done by a disposition of the matter, in short, well discriminated chapters, easily referred to in a table of contents; devoted mainly to the immediate proceedings of Congress, but relieved by such episodes of a personal character as obituaries, or retirement from office of eminent actors on the scene. Thus there are chapters on the Admission of Missouri, on the Panama Mission, the Retirement of Rufus King, the arrival of La Fayette, the Deaths of Adams and Jefferson. The book is thus a succession of historical tableaux. In one point of view it is highly commendable, for its clear succinct narrative-the ease and bonhommie of the style. It is fluent without being diffuse, and exhibits the result of a long habit of imparting important information in the readiest and most intelligible way.

In addition to the ordinary narrative of events, which might be looked for in a view of the times, the book has two specialities in the reprint of the author's speeches bearing on the subjects, or of such portions of them as he still chooses to adopt, and the use of the unpublished papers of General Jackson which are to be drawn upon.

Mr. Benton's opportunities as an actor and eye-witness, give him great advantages in this species of historical memoir-for such it is, neither exactly history nor biography. In his preface he quotes Macaulay, and justly claims the

prestige of his experience in public affairs for his work. If Gibbon, and Fox, and Mackintosh, wrote better for being Parliament men, Mr. Benton can set forth as well for his story the quorum pars magna fui. "I was," says he, "in the Senate the whole time of which I write-an active, business member, attending and attentive -in the confidence of half the administrations, and a close observer of the others-had an inside view of transactions of which the public saw only the outside, and of many of which the two sides were very different-saw the secret springs and hidden machinery by which men and parties were to be moved, and measures promoted or thwarted --saw patriotism and ambition at their respective labors, and was generally able to discriminate between them."

While the second volume was in progress, early in 1855, Mr. Benton's house at St. Louis was destroyed by fire, and his library and manuscripts perished in the flames. A letter which he wrote to his publishers will show the prospects of the work, and the prominent characteristics of the man in energy and literary industry.

WASHINGTON CITY, March 2, 1855. Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.:

Gentlemen: It is not necessary to tell you what has happened, cela va sans dire. The point is, the effect and what is to be done. The answer is, first, it will more than double my labor; next, it will delay the second volume say six months, or until the spring of 1856; third, there are some things lost which cannot be replaced, but which were chiefly for a posthumous volume, not coming under our present agreement-most of it composed of correspondence, such as I had deemed worthy, both for the character of the writers and the matter, to go to posterity. For the rest, I go to work immediately (after my return from St. Louis), and work incessantly.

Yours truly

THOMAS H. BENTON.

The

Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply embued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans") had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life: days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." He touched that age in 1828; and true to all his purposes, he was true to his resolve in this, and executed it with the quietude and indifference of an ordinary transaction. He was in the middle of a third senatorial term, and in the

full possession of all his faculties of mind and body; but his time for retirement had come-the time fixed by himself, but fixed upon conviction and for well considered reasons, and inexorable to him as if fixed by fate. To the friends who urged him to remain to the end of his term, and who insisted that his mind was as good as ever, he would answer, that it was good enough yet to let him know that he ought to quit office before his mind quit him, and that he did not mean to risk the fate of the Arch

bishop of Grenada. He resigned his senatorial honors as he had worn them-meekly, unostentatiously, in a letter of thanks and gratitude to the General Assembly of his State;-and gave to repose at home that interval of thought and quietude which every wise man would wish to place between the turmoil of life and the stillness of eternity. He had nine years of this tranquil enjoyment, and died without pain or suffering June 29th, 1837,— characteristic in death as in life. It was eight o'clock in the morning when he felt that the supreme hour had come, had himself full-dressed with his habitual neatness, walked in the room and lay upon the bed, by turns conversing kindly with those who were about him, and showing by his conduct that he was ready and waiting, but hurrying nothing. It was the death of Socrates, all but the hemlock, and in that full faith of which the Grecian sage had only a glimmering. He directed his own grave on the point of a sterile ridge (where nobody would wish to plough), and covered with a pile of rough flintstone (which nobody would wish to build with), deeming this sterility and the uselessness of this rock the best security for that undisturbed repose of the bones which is still desirable to those who are indifferent 10 monuments.

In almost all strongly-marked characters there is usually some incident or sign, in early life, which shows that character, and reveals to the close observer the type of the future man. So it was with Mr. Macon. His firmness, his patriotism, his selfdenial, his devotion to duty and disregard of office and emolument; his modesty, integrity, self-control, and subjection of conduct to the convictions of reason and the dictates of virtue, all so steadily exemplified in a long life, were all shown from the early age of eighteen, in the miniature representation of individual action, and only confirmed in the subsequent public exhibitions of a long, beautiful, and exalted career.

HENRY A. S. DEARBORN. HENRY ALEXANDER SCAMMELL DEARBORN WAS born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1783. He was the son of General Dearborn, an officer in the American Revolution, the author of a MS. journal of his expedition to Canada, imprisonment in Quebec, expedition to Wyoming, and other adventures during the war, printed in his life by his son. He was afterwards Secretary of War during Jefferson's administration, served in the war of 1912, and was made minister to Portugal. Henry Dearborn was educated at William and Mary College, studied law, and practised at Salem, Massachusetts. He subsequently removed to Portland, where he superintended the erection of the forts in the harbor. He was appointed Collector of Boston by Madison, and at the commencement of the war of 1812 commanded the troops in Boston harbor. He was a member of the convention called to revise the constitution of the state in 1821, and in 1829 a representative from Roxbury, and from 1831 to 1833 member

of Congress from the Norfolk District. In 1847 he was chosen Mayor of Roxbury, an office he retained until his death, July 29, 1851.

General Dearborn published, in 1819, a Memoir on the Commerce of the Black Sea, in two vols. 8vo., with a quarto volume of maps (Boston); in 1839, Letters on the Internal Improvements and Commerce of the West (Boston); and was also the author of a Biography of Commodore Bainbridge, and of his father.

JOHN SANDERSON,

THE author of the lively sketches of French society in that attractive book The American in Paris, was a native of Pennsylvania, born in Carlisle in 1783. He first studied the classics (favorite passages of which, at the close of his life, he interwove in his essays with happy effect) with a clergyman of his region, travelling some seven miles from home daily for his instruction. In 1806 he studied law at Philadelphia, but requiring a means of immediate support became a teacher in the Clermont Seminary, afterwards marrying the daughter of the principal, John T. Carré, and becoming a partner in the enterprise. He contributed to the Port Folio, and wrote occasionally for the Aurora. The Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1820, were written by himself and his brother. Our author's share of this work was the composition of the first and second volumes. In 1833 he defended his favorite classical literature, as a branch of study, in the letters signed Robertjeot, directed against a plan of education proposed for the Girard College. His health failing he embarked for Havre in the summer of 1835, and remained in Paris nearly a year, writing the series of descriptive papers which he afterwards published in 1838, entitled Sketches of Paris: in Familiar Letters to his Friends, by an American Gentleman. He also visited England before his return, of which he commenced a similar account in several papers in the Knickerbocker Magazine.

Returning to America he taught the Greek and Latin languages in the Philadelphia High-School. Though broken in health he maintained a habit of cheerfulness, exercising his talent in humor and sarcasm. Griswold, who saw him in his last days, speaks of his mirth and tenderness, and fondness for his daughter, and his cherished recollections of his departed wife.* He died at Philadelphia, April 5, 1844.

The peculiar merit of his Sketches of Paris consists in their light French tone of enjoyment. He caught the spirit of the place and admirably transfused it into the style of his letters, mingled with quotations from Ovid and Horace, and with an occasional freedom of expression borrowed from the gay memories of the capital of which he was writing.

THE PARISIAN "PENSION."

If a gentleman comes to Paris in the dog-days, when his countrymen are spread over Europe, at watering-places and elsewhere, and when every soul of a French man is out of town-if he is used to love his friends at home, and be loved by them, and to see them gather around him in the evenings-let

Biog. Notice, Prose Writers of America.