Mas Kitty Bland are one and the same. nation, edification, humiliation, mortifica- | a crown to her husband and naughty Miss tion, purification. More than half the book is made up of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, some of Watts's hymns, and the whole of that great Catechism which one hundred and twenty divines spent five years in preparing. There, too, are Mr. Rogers's verses, and John Cotton's "Spiritual Milk for American Babes; exhortations not to cheat at play, not to lie, not to use ill words, not to call ill names, not to be a dunce, and to love school. The Primer ends with the famous dialogue between Christ, Youth, 'and the Devil. Moved by pity and a wish to make smooth the rough path to learning, some kind soul prepared A Lottery-Book for Children." The only difficulty in teaching children to read was, he thought, the difficulty of keeping their minds from roaming, and to 'prevent this precipitancy was the object of the alphabet on the other two pictures. As soon, he explained, as the child could speak, it should thrust a pin through the leaf from the side whereon the pictures were at the letter on the other, and should continue to do this till at last the letter was pierced. Turning the leaf after cach trial, the mind of the child would be fixed so often and so long on the letter that it would ever after be remembered. The illustrations in the book are beneath those of a patent-medicine almanac, but are quite as good as any that can be found in children's books of that day. No child had then ever seen such specimens of the wood-engraver's and the printer's and the binder's art as now, at the approach of every Christmas, issue from hundreds of presses. The covers of such chap-books were bits of wood, and the backs coarse leather. On the covers were sometimes a common blue paper, and sometimes a hideous wall-paper, adorned with horses and dogs, roosters and eagles, standing in marvellous attitudes on gilt or copper scrolls. The letter-press of none specially illustrated, but the same cut was used again and again to express the most opposite ideas. A woman with a dog holding her train is now Vanity, and now Miss Allworthy going abroad to buy books for her brother and sister. A huge vessel with three masts is now a yacht, and now the ship in which Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull. The virtuous woman that is was Mean and cheap as such chap-books were, the pedler who hawked them sold not one to the good wives of a fishing village. The women had not the money to buy with; the boys had not the disposition to read. Till he was nine a lad did little more than watch the men pitch pennies in the road, listen to sea stories, and hurry at the cry of "Rock him,' Squael him," to help his playmates pelt with stones some unoffending boy from a neighboring village. By the time he had seen his tenth birthday he was old enough not to be sea-sick, not to cry during a storm at sea, and to be of some use about a ship, and went on his first trip to the Banks. The skipper and the crew called him "cuttail," for he received no money save for the fish he caught, and each one he caught was marked by snipping a piece from the tail. After an apprenticeship of three or four years the cut-tail "header, stood upon the same footing as the sharesmen," and learned all the duties which a "splitter" and a "salter" must perform. A crew numbered eight; four were "sharesmen and four were apprentices; went twice a year to the Banks, and stayed each time from three to five months. became a Men who had passed through such a training were under no temptation to travel westward. They took no interest; they bore no part in the great exodus. They still continued to make their trips and bring home their "fares," while hosts of New Englanders poured into New York, opening the valleys, founding cities, and turning struggling hamlets into villages of no mean kind. Catskill, in 1792, numbered ten dwellings and owned one vessel of sixty tons. In 1800 there were in the place one hundred and fifty-six houses, two ships, a schooner, and eight sloops of one hundred tons each, all owned there, and employed in carrying produce Their poverty was extreme. Nothing was so scarce as food; many a wayfarer was turned from their doors with the solemn assurance that they had not enough for themselves. The only window in many a cabin was a hole in the roof for the smoke to pass through. In the winter the snow beat through the chinks and sifted under the door, till it was heaped up about the sleepers on the floor before the fire. to New York. Six hundred and twentyfour bushels of wheat were brought to the Catskill market in 1792. Forty-six thousand one hundred and sixty-four bushels came in 1800. On a single day in 1801 the merchants bought four thousand one hundred and eight bushels of wheat, and the same day eight hundred loaded sleighs came into the village by the western road. In 1790 a fringe of clearings ran along the western shore of Lake Cham- Just behind the pioneers came the more plain to the northern border, and pushed thrifty settlers, a class long since historical out through the broad valley between the and now almost extinct. During eighty Adirondacks and the Catskills to Seneca years the emigrant train, so often porand Cayuga Lakes. In 1800 the Adiron- trayed both by painters and by travellers, dack region was wholly surrounded. The has been gradually disappearing beyond the emigrants had passed Oneida Lake, had Alleghanies, beyond the Mississippi, bepassed Oswego, and, skirting the shores yond the Missouri, beyond the Rocky of Ontario and the banks of the St. Mountains into the region of the extreme Lawrence, had joined with those on Lake Northwest. To-day it can seldom be seen Champlain. Some had gone down the out of Washington and Oregon, and has valleys of the Delaware and Susquehanna reached the shores of Puget Sound. In to the Southern border of the State. The 1800 the high-peaked wagons with their front of emigration was far beyond Elmira white canvas covers, the little herd, the and Bath. Just before it went the specu- company of sturdy men and women, were lators, the land-jobbers, the men afflicted to be seen travelling westward on all the with what in derision was called "terra-highways from New England to Albany, phobia." They formed companies and and from Albany towards the lakes. They bought millions of acres. They went were the true settlers, cleared the forests, singly and purchased whole townships bridged the streams, built up towns, culti as fast as the surveyors could locate, buy-vated the land, and sent back to Albany ing on trust and selling for wheat, for and Troy the yield of their farms. With lumber, for whatever the land could yield them the merchants of the East kept up or the settler give. Nor was the pioneer a close connection, exchanging rum and less infatuated. An irresistible fonging molasses, hoes, axes, iron pots, clothing, drove him westward, and still westward, everything of which they stood in want, till some Indian scalped him, or till hunger, and receiving lumber, wheat, pot and want, bad food, and exposure broke him pearl ashes in return. Favored by this down, and the dreaded Genesee fever swept great trade, Troy grew and prospered at him away. The moment such a man had an astonishing rate. The place may be built a log-cabin,cleared an acre, girdled the said to have begun its existence in 1786, trees, and sowed a handful of grain, he when a few men of push induced the was impatient to be once more moving. owners of the Van Der Heyden farms to He had no peace till his little farm was sell them some plots, and on these put up sold and he had plunged into the forest, a few houses, and named the village Vanto seek a new and temporary home. The derheyden. From the very start it began purchaser in time would make a few im- to thrive. In 1791 it was made the provements, clear a few more acres, plant county-seat; yet, even then, it was so a little more grain, and then in turn sell small that the inhabitants were every and hurry westward. After him came Sunday summoned to church in the store the founders of villages and towns, who, by blasts upon a conch-shell. Two years when the cabins about them numbered later Troy had a court-honse and a jail, a ten, felt crowded and likewise moved church, the only paper-mill north of the away. Travellers through the Genesee highlands, and in 1797 a weekly newsvalley tell us they could find no man who paper. The next year the Northern Budhad not in this way changed his abode at get was drawn away from Lansingburg least six times. The hardship which these and became a Troy weekly paper. In his people endured is beyond description. appeal to the citizens the editor declares that, with the utmost economy, the expenses of his office are thirty dollars a week, and they sustained him. In 1799 the taxable property was over eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Grain and lumber were the source of this wealth. No sleigh that came into Troy with boards or logs, no wagon that rolled up to a granary with bags of grain, was suffered to go away loaded. Along the river bank were great storehouses filled with bins. On the land-side was the lifting tackle, by which the sacks of corn or wheat were raised to the loft and placed in the pan of the clumsy scales. The counter weights were stones, and to weigh with them was a problem in arithmetic. On the waterside projected long spouts, through which the grain was poured into the sloops and schooners beneath. In the great flourmills of Pennsylvania, grain elevators, with buckets not larger than a common tea-cup, were in use. The second pathway over which thousands of emigrants rushed westward lay through the valley of the Ohio. As early as 1794 the trade between Pittsburg and Cincinnati had become so paying that a line of packet-boats began to ply between the two towns. They made the trip once a month, were bullet-proof, and, for defence against the Indians, carried six cannon throwing a pound-ball each, and were plentifully supplied with muskets and ammunition. When Wayne quieted the Indians, the stream of emigration turned northward, and the territory northwest of the river filled rapidly. At the time the first census was taken there could not be found from the Ohio to the Lakes, from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, but four thousand two hundred and eighty human beings. The second census gave to Ohio Territory alone a population of forty-five thousand three hundred and sixty-five. The numbers in Kentucky in the same period had swollen from seventy-three thousand six hundred to two hundred and twenty thousand nine hundred and fifty. This was nine thousand greater than in the State of New Jersey. The figures of the census are expressive of the enormous exodus from New England. The total increase of population in the five States of that section, including Maine, was two hundred and twenty-nine thousand. In the five Southern States the gain was four hundred and sixteen thousand. Of the New England States, four lost and one retained rank. Of the five Southern States, two lost rank, two gained rank, and Virginia remained first. Such was the emigration to New York that it rose from the fifth to the third State in the Union. North Carolina fell from the third in 1790 to the fourth in 1800. Thousands of her people had gone_over the mountains to settle along the Cumberland, the Holston, and the Kentucky border, there to live a life of poverty, sacrifice, and independence. The centre of population had moved westward fortyone miles. Beyond the Blue Ridge everything was most primitive. Half the roads were traces," and blazed. 66 More than half the houses, even in the settlements, were log-cabins. When a stranger came to such a place to stay, the men built him a cabin, and made the building an occasion for sport. The trees felled, four corner men were elected to notch the logs, and while they were busy, the others ran races, wrestled, played leap-frog, kicked the hat, fought, gouged, gambled, drank, did everything then considered an amusement. After the notching was finished the raising took but a few hours. Many a time the cabin was built, roofed, the door and window cut out, and the owner moved in before sundown. The chinks were stopped with chips and smeared with. mud. The chimney was of logs, coated with mud six inches thick. The table and the benches, the bed-stead and the door, were such as could be made with an axe, an auger, and a saw. A rest for the rifle and some pegs for clothes completed the fittings. PSALM CXXXIII. OF DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL. [Dirk Rafael Kamphuysen was born at Gorkum, Holland, 1586, died 1626. Celebrated for his "Paraphrase of the Psalms."] O, blest abode, where love is ever vernal, Where tranquil peace and concord are eternal, Where none usurp the highest claim, But each with pride asserts the other's fame! T O, what are all earth's joys, compared to God in his boundless mercy joys to meet it; thee, Fraternal unanimity? E'en as the ointment, whose sweet odors blended, From Aaron's head upon his beard descended; Which hung a while in fragrance there, Bedewing every individual hair, And, falling thence, with rich perfume ran o'er The holy garb the prophet wore: So doth the unity that lives with brothers Share its best blessings and its joys with others, And makes them seem as if one frame Contained their minds, and they were formed the same, His promises of future blessings greet it, And joy and fortune, that remain sublime THE LIVES OF THE ROMAN POETS. [Caius Tranquillus Suetonius, son of Suetonius Lenis, a tribune of the 13th legion under Otho, was born probably a few years after the death of Nero. He is known to us chiefly as a Roman historian and miscellaneous writer, for his merits as which he is highly praised by the younger Pliny. He was also, it And spreads its sweetest breath o'er every is supposed, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, and a part, Until it penetrates the heart. E'en as the dew, that, at the break of morning, All nature with its beauty is adorning, And flows from Hermon calm and still, The drops for which it pines: So are fraternal peace and concord ever Ah! happy they whom genial concord blesses! On virtue founded, stand unshaken there; Whence vanish all the passions that destroy Tranquillity and inward joy. Who practise good are in themselves rewarded, For their own deeds lie in their hearts recorded; And thus fraternal love, when bound composer of exercises in pleading; nay, from a letter of Pliny's to him, it may be gathered that he sometimes pleaded causes in person. Pliny procured him the dignity of military tribune, which, by Suetonius' desire, he got transferred to another. Though childless, Suetonius was, through the same friendly agency, presented by Trajan with the jus trium liberorum, which, in that reign, was only to be had by great interest. He was afterward secretary of the emperor Hadrian, whose favor he had secured. The date of his death is unknown. All his works (among which, as we learn from Suidas, there were several on topics usually treated by grammarians) have been lost, except his Lives of the Caesars, his Lives of Eminent Grammarians, and (in part only) his Lives of Eminent Rhetoricians, and Lives of the Poets. It is by the first of these works that he is most favorably known, replete as it is with information about the twelve Cæsars, from Caius Julius to Domitian, which is to be had nowhere else, and abounding with anec dotes which, while they too often prove the profligacy of his heroes, testify to the impartiality of their chronicler. From a period long before the renaissance to the present these "Lives" have always been favorite reading, and have found numerous editors, the best of whom is still Burmann (Amsterdam, 1736), and numerous translators into nearly every European language. From his works we select all that has come down to us of the lives of the Roman poets.] THE LIFE OF TERENCE. Publius Terentius Afer, a native of Carthage, was a slave, at Rome, of the senator Terentius Lucanus, who, struck by his abilities and handsome person, By virtue, is with its own blisses crowned, gave him not only a liberal education in And tastes, in sweetness that itself bestows, his youth, but his freedom when he arWhat use, what power, from concord flows.rived at years of maturity. Some say that he was a captive taken in war, but this, as Fenestella' informs us, could by no means have been the case, since both his birth and death took place in the interval between the termination of the second Punic war and the commencement of the third; nor even supposing that he had been taken prisoner by the Numidian or Getulian tribes, could he have fallen into the hands of a Roman general, as there was no commercial intercourse between the Italians and Africans until after the fall of Carthage. Terence lived in great familiarity with many persons of high station, and especially with Scipio Africanus, and Caius Lælius. 4 3 He wrote comedies, the earliest of which, The Andria, having to be performed at the public spectacles given by the ædiles, he was commanded to read it first before Cæcilius. Having been introduced while Cæcilius was at supper, and being meanly dressed, he is reported to have read the beginning of the play seated on a low stool near the great man's couch. But after reciting a few verses, he was invited to take his place at table, and, having supped with his host, went through the rest to his great delight. This play and five others were received by the public with similar applause, although Volcatius, in his enumeration of them, says that "The Hecyra must not be reckoned among these." The Eunuch was even acted twice the same day, and earned more money than any comedy, whoever was the writer, had ever done before, namely, eight thousand sesterces; besides which, a certain sum accrued to the author for the title. But Varro prefers the opening of The Adelphi 1 Lucius Fenestella, an historical writer, is mentioned by Lactantius, Seneca, and Pliny, who says, that he died towards the close of the reign of Tiberius. 2 The second Punic war ended A.U.C. 552, and the third began A.U.C. 605. Terence was probably born about 560. 3 Carthage was laid in ruins A.U.C. 606 or 607, six hundred and sixty-seven years after its foundation. 4 St. Jerom also states that Terence read the "Andria" to Cæcilius who was a comic poet at Rome; but it is clearly an anachronism, as he died two years before this period. It is proposed, therefore, to amend the text by substituting Acilius, the ædile. The "Hecyra," The Mother-in-law, is one of Terence's plays. About £80 sterling; the price paid for the two performances. What further right of authorship is meant by the words following, is not very clear. to that of Menander. It is very commonly reported that Terence was assisted in his works by Lælius and Scipio,' with whom he lived in such great intimacy. He gave some currency to this report himself, nor did he ever attempt to defend himself against it, except in a light way; as in the prologue to The Adelphi : Nam quod isti dicunt malevoli, homines nobiles Hunc adjutare, assidueque una scribere; Quod illi maledictum vehemens existimant, Eam laudem hic ducit maximam: cum illis placet, Qui vobis universis et populo placent; Which malice tells that certain noble persons Colman. He appears to have protested against this imputation with less earnestness, because the notion was far from being disagreeable to Lælius and Scipio. It therefore gained ground, and prevailed in after times. Quintus Memmius, in his speech in his own defence, says: "Publius Africanus, who borrowed from Terence a character which he had acted in private, brought it on the stage in his name. Nepos tells us he found in some book that C. Lælius, when he was on some occasion at Puteoli, on the calends [the first] of March, being requested by his wife to rise early, begged her not to suffer him to be disturbed, as he had gone to bed late, having been engaged in writing with more than usual success. On her asking him to tell her what he had been writing, he repeated 8 7 This report is mentioned by Cicero (Ad Attic, vii. 3). who applies it to the younger Lælius. The Scipio here mentioned is Scipio Africanus, who was at this time about twenty-one years of age. 8 The calends of March was the festival of married women. |