insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier, but less despotic as Montesquieu supposes than in some other countries, and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts, and a great deal more blood was spilt. In Turkey, where the sole nod of the despot is death, insurrections are the events of every day. Compare again the ferocious depredations of their insurgents with the order, the moderation, and the almost self-extinguishment of ours. And say finally whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most. certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. After all, it is my principle that the will of the majority should prevail. If they approve the proposed Constitution in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes they will amend it whenever they shall find it works wrong. This reliance cannot deceive us as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case while there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there. I have tired you by this time with disquisitions which you have already heard repeated by others a thousand and a thousand times; and therefore shall only add assurances of the esteem and attachment with which I have the honor to be, dear sir, your affectionate friend and servant.

P. S.

The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions, that there shall always be a twelvemonth between the engrossing a bill and passing it; that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two-thirds of both Houses, instead of a bare majority.

DOUGLAS JERROLD

(1803-1857)

HERE is a winning quality in Douglas Jerrold, whether as man or writer. Popularly known as a brilliant wit, and often regarded as a cynical one, he was a manly and big-hearted moralist, a hater of sham, a lover of lovely things,-one who did good while he gave pleasure.

He was born in London January 3d, 1803; his father, Samuel Jerrold, being actor and theatre lessee of the not too successful kind. Douglas William (the son's full name) had no regular education: he learned to read and write from a member of a theatrical company, and being of a studious turn, got by his

DOUGLAS JERROLD

own exertions such knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian as should enable him to make the acquaintance of their dramatic literature. He acted occasionally as a boy and young man, but never cared for a player's life. For the two years between 1813 and 1815 he served as midshipman in the navy: the episode was not ill suited to his careless, generous nature. He returned to London in 1816 and apprenticed himself to a printer. The family was poor, and Douglas eked out his actor-father's income by doing journalistic work and articles for periodicals. Soon he began dramatic composition with the play More Frightened than Hurt,' which was produced in London in 1820; and although looked at askance by managers at first, was eventually translated into French, and twice retranslated into English and played under other names. His earliest genuine hit, however, was the lively comedy-farce 'Black-Eyed Susan: or, All in the Downs' (1829), which was brought out at the Surrey Theatre, and was acted four hundred times that year. From this encouragement Jerrold made forty plays during twenty-odd years, many of the dramas scoring successes. Other well-known pieces are 'The Rent Day,' 'Nell Gwynne,' Time Works Wonders,' and 'The Bubbles of the Day. In 1836 he managed the Strand Theatre, which proved a bad

venture.

XIV-517

All this dramatic activity, even, does not represent Jerrold's best work; nor did it call out his most typical and welcome powers. He continued to do other literary work, and his journalistic career was strenuous. He contributed to leading papers like the Athenæum and Blackwood's, and edited various periodicals, such as the Illuminated Magazine, the Shilling Magazine, and the Heads of the People,-in most cases with a disastrous financial result. He made a success, however, of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, for which he wrote in each number three columns of leaders and did literary reviews, receiving £1,000 salary.

When Punch was founded in 1841, Jerrold's happiest vein sought an outlet. He at once became a contributor, and continued to be one for the rest of his life, some sixteen years. His articles, signed Q., were one of the features of that famous purveyor of representative British fun, pictorial and literary. The series of Punch papers perhaps most familiar to the general public appeared as a book in 1846, under the title 'Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures.' 'Punch's Letters to his Son' and 'Cakes and Ale' are also widely known. Jerrold himself cared most for his writings in which his serious views and deeper purpose came out: the 'Chronicles of Clovernook,' his pet book, is an example. Indeed, the fact that he was an advanced thinker, a broad-minded humanitarian preacher, is illustrated in such a moral allegory as that here selected. Jerrold's reputation as a wit has naturally enough deflected attention from this aspect of his work, which well deserves appreciation. A collective edition of his works in eight volumes appeared in 1851-4; and in 1888 his son, William Blanchard Jerrold, edited in book form the 'Wit and Wisdom of Douglas Jerrold.'

Jerrold was short and stocky in person, with clear-cut features, blue eyes, and in his later years picturesque gray hair. He was of a social nature; fond of music, a good singer himself; impulsive, fiery, hasty often in letting loose the arrows of his wit,- but simple, almost boyish in manner, and a warm-hearted man whose interest in the right was intense. Always impractical, he left his affairs in a complicated condition. In short, his was a character whose faults are palpable but which is withal very lovable.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE TILL

THE HERMIT'S STORY

Is a strange tale, but it hath the recommendation of brev. ity. Some folks may see nothing in it but the tricksiness of an extravagant spirit; and some perchance may pluck a heart of meaning out of it. However, be it as it may, you shall

hear it, sir.

"There was a man called Isaac Pugwash, a dweller in a miserable slough of London, a squalid denizen of one of the foul nooks of that city of Plutus. He kept a shop; which, though small as a cabin, was visited as granary and storehouse by half the neighborhood. All the creature comforts of the poor-from bread to that questionable superfluity, small beer-were sold by Isaac. Strange it was that with such a trade Pugwash grew not rich. He had many bad debts, and of all shopkeepers was most unfortunate in false coin. Certain it is, he had neither eye nor ear for bad money. Counterfeit semblances of majesty beguiled him out of bread and butter, and cheese, and red herring, just as readily as legitimate royalty struck at the mint. Malice might impute something of this to the political principles of Pugwash; who, as he had avowed himself again and again, was no lover of a monarchy. Nevertheless, I cannot think Pugwash had so little regard for the countenance of majesty as to welcome it as readily when silvered copper as when sterling silver. No: a wild, foolish enthusiast was Pugwash; but in the household matter of good and bad money he had very wholesome prejudices. He had a reasonable wish to grow rich, yet was entirely ignorant of the byways and short cuts to wealth. He would have sauntered through life with his hands in his pockets and a daisy in his mouth; and dying with just enough in his house to pay the undertaker, would have thought himself a fortunate fellow,he was, in the words of Mrs. Pugwash, such a careless, foolish, dreaming creature. He was cheated every hour by a customer of some kind; and yet to deny credit to anybody-he would as soon have denied the wife of his bosom. His customers knew the weakness, and failed not to exercise it. To be sure, now and then, fresh from conjugal counsel, he would refuse to add a single herring to a debtor's score: no, he would not be sent to the workhouse by anybody. A quarter of an hour after, the denied herring, with an added small loaf, was given to the little

girl sent to the shop by the rejected mother: 'he couldn't bear to see poor children wanting anything.'

Pugwash had another unprofitable weakness. He was fond of what he called Nature, though in his dim close shop he could give her but a stifling welcome. Nevertheless he had the earliest primroses on his counter,-'they threw,' he said, 'such a nice light about the place.' A sly, knavish customer presented Isaac with a pot of polyanthuses; and won by the flowery gift, Pugwash gave the donor ruinous credit. The man with wall-flowers regularly stopped at Isaac's shop, and for only sixpence Pugwash would tell his wife he had made the place a Paradise. 'If we can't go to Nature, Sally, isn't it a pleasant thing to be able to bring Nature to us?' Whereupon Mrs. Pugwash would declare that a man with at least three children to provide for had no need to talk of Nature. Nevertheless, the flower-man made his weekly call. Though at many a house the penny could not every week be spared to buy a hint, a look of Nature for the darkened dwellers, Isaac, despite of Mrs. Pugwash, always purchased. It is a common thing, an old familiar cry," said the Hermit, "to see the poor man's florist, to hear his loud-voiced invitation. to take his nosegays, his penny roots; and yet is it a call, a conjuration of the heart of man overlabored and desponding-walled in by the gloom of a town-divorced from the fields and their sweet healthful influences-almost shut out from the sky that reeks in vapor over him;—it is a call that tells him there are things of the earth besides food and covering to live for; and that God in his great bounty hath made them for all men. Is it not so?" asked the Hermit.

"Most certainly," we answered: "it would be the very sinfulness of avarice to think otherwise."

"Why, sir," said the Hermit benevolently smiling, "thus considered, the loud-lunged city bawler of roots and flowers becomes. a high benevolence, a peripatetic priest of Nature. Adown dark lanes and miry alleys he takes sweet remembrances-touching records of the loveliness of earth, that with their bright looks and balmy odors cheer and uplift the dumpish heart of man; that make his soul stir within him; and acknowledge the beautiful. The penny, the ill-spared penny-for it would buy a wheaten roll-the poor housewife pays for a root of primrose, is her offering to the hopeful loveliness of Nature; is her testimony of the soul struggling with the blighting, crushing circumstance