was in possession of large estates, allied to the highest orders of French nobility, surrounded by friends and relatives, with prospects of future distinction and favor as fair as ever opened to the ardent view of aspiring and ambitious youth. He was just married to a lady of great worth and respectability, and it would seem that nothing was wanting to a life of affluence and ease. Yet Lafayette left his friends, his wealth, his country, his prospects of distinction, his wife, and all the sources of domestic bliss, to assist a foreign nation in its struggle for freedom, and at a time, too, when the prospects of that country's success were dark, disheartening, and almost hopeless. He fought for that country, he fed and clothed her armies, he imparted of his wealth to her poor. He saw her purposes accomplished, and her government esta blished on principles of liberty. He refused all compensation for his services. He returned to his native land, and engaged in contests for liberty there. He was imprisoned by a foreign government, suffered every indignity and every cruelty that could be inflicted, and lived, after his release, almost an exile on the spot where he was born. More than forty years after he first embarked in the cause of American liberty, he returns to see once more his few surviving companions in arms, and is met by the grateful salutations of the whole nation. It is not possible to reflect on these facts without feeling our admiration excited to a degree that almost borders on reverence. Sober history, it is hoped, will do justice to the name of Lafayette. It is not in the power of fiction to embellish his character or his life.

New England Galaxy, 1826.

THE EVILS OF LOTTERIES.

A lottery is gaming. This is against the policy of society, and there are few civilized nations that have not adopted means to restrain or entirely prohibit it; because it is seeking property for which no equivalent is to be paid, and because it leads directly to losses and poverty, and, by exciting bad passions, is the fruitful original of vice and crime.

It is the worst species of gaming, because it brings adroitness, cunning, experience, and skill to contend against ignorance, folly, distress, and desperation. It can be carried on to an indefinite and indefinable extent without exposure; and, by a mode of settling the chances by "combination numbers," -an invention of the modern school of gambling,-the fate of thousands and hundreds of thousands may be determined by a single turn of the wheel.

Lotteries, like other games of chance, are seductive and infatuating. Every new loss is an inducement to a new adventure;

and, filled with vain hopes of recovering what is lost, the unthinking victim is led on, from step to step, till he finds it impossible to regain his ground, and he gradually sinks into a miserable outcast; or, by a bold and still more guilty effort, plunges at once into that gulf where he hopes protection from the stings of conscience, a refuge from the reproaches of the world, and oblivion from existence.

If we consider the dealing in lottery-tickets as a calling or employment, so far as the venders are concerned, it deserves to be treated, in legislation, as those acts are which are done to get money by making others suffer; to live upon society by making a portion of its members dishonest, idle, poor, vicious, and criminal. In its character and consequences, the dealing in lotterytickets is the worst species of gaming, and deserves a severer punishment than any fine would amount to. If it involves the moral and legal offences of fraud and cheating, does it not deserve an infamous punishment, if any fraudulent acquisition of mere property should be punished with infamy? Considered in its complicated wrongs to society, it certainly deserves the severest punishment, because it makes infamous criminals out of innocent persons, and visits severe afflictions on parents, employers, family connections, and others, who in this respect have done no wrong themselves; and thus the innocent are made to suffer for the guilty, an anomaly which is revolting to all our notions of justice, and to all the moral and natural sympathies of mankind. Legislative Report, 1833.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON, 1779-1843.

"The element of beauty which in thee

Was a prevailing spirit, pure and high,

And from all guile had made thy being free,
Now seems to whisper thou canst never die!

For Nature's priests we shed no idle tear:

Their mantles on a noble lineage fall:

Though thy white locks at length have press'd the bier

Death could not fold thee in Oblivion's pall:

Majestic forms thy hand in grace array'd

Eternal watch shall keep beside thy tomb,

And hues aerial, that thy pencil stay'd,

Its shades with Heaven's radiance illume:

Art's meek apostle, holy is thy sway,

From the heart's records ne'er to pass away!"

H. T. TUCKERMAN.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON was born at Charleston, S. C., on the 5th of November, 1779. He was sent to New England to receive his education, and graduated at Harvard College in 1800. Throughout his collegiate course, he showed his innate love of nature, music, poetry, and painting; and though, from his strong aspirations after the beautiful, the pure, and the sublime, he led what might be

called an ideal life, yet he was far from being a recluse, but was a popular, highspirited youth, and passionately fond of society. As a scholar in classical and English literature his rank was high; and on taking his degree he delivered a poem which was much applauded.

On leaving college, he determined to devote his life to the fine arts, and embarked for London in the autumn of 1801. He at once became a student of the Royal Academy, with whose President, Benjamin West, he formed an intimate and lasting friendship. After three years spent in England, he went to Paris, and thence to Italy, where he first met with Coleridge. In 1809, he returned to America, and remained two years in Boston, his adopted home, and there married the sister of Dr. W. E. Channing. In 1811, he went again to England, where his reputation as an artist had been completely established. In 1813, he published a small volume entitled The Sylphs of the Seasons, and other Poems, which was republished in this country, and gave him a rank among our best poets. Soon after this he passed through a long and serious illness, from which he had scarcely recovered when he suffered the loss of his wife. These trials, however severe, were truly sanctified to him: he became an earnest and sincere Christian, and to the close of life preserved a beauty and consistency of Christian character rarely equalled.

In 1818, he again returned to America, and again made Boston his home. "There, in a circle of warmly-attached friends, surrounded by a sympathy and admiration which his elevation and purity, the entire harmony of his life and pursuits, could not fail to create, he devoted himself to his art, the labor of his love." In 1830, he married his second wife, the daughter of the late Judge Dana, and removed to Cambridge, and soon after began the preparation of a course of lectures on art. But four of these he completed. His death occurred at his own house, Cambridge, on Sunday morning, July 9, 1843. "He had finished a day and week of labor in his studio, upon his great picture of Belshazzar's Feast, the fresh paint denoting that the last touches of his pencil were given to that glorious but melancholy monument of the best years of his later life."3

In one of his letters he thus writes:-"To no other man do I owe so much, intellectually, as to Mr. Coleridge, with whom I became acquainted in Rome, and who has honored me with his friendship for more than five-and-twenty years. He used to call Rome the silent city; but I never could think of it as such while with him; for, meet him when and where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but, like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living stream seemed specially to flow for every classic ruin over which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy."

2 This embodiment of a sublime conception, magnificent even in its unfinished state, may be seen in the Picture Gallery of the Boston Athenæum.

3 Memoir of Allston prefixed to an edition of his works, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Allston's appearance and manners accorded perfectly with his character. His form was slight and his movements quietly active. The lines of his countenance, the breadth of the brow, the large and speaking eye, and the long, white hair, made him an immediate object of interest. If not engaged in conversation, there was a serene abstraction in his air. When death so tranquilly overtook him, for many hours it was difficult to believe that he was not sleeping, so perfectly did

The Sylphs of the Seasons is Allston's most finished poem. The argument in brief is this. The poet falls asleep, and in his dream finds himself in

where "four damsels stood of faery race," the sylphs of the four seasons,-each of whom addresses him, striving by her eloquence to "win his heart and hand.” The following is the best portion of

THE ADDRESS OF THE SYLPH OF SPRING.

Then spake the Sylph of Spring serene:-
"'Tis I thy joyous heart, I ween,

With sympathy shall move;

For I, with living melody

Of birds, in choral symphony,
First waked thy soul to poesy,
To piety and love.

"When thou, at call of vernal breeze,
And beckoning bough of budding trees,
Hast left thy sullen fire,

And stretch'd thee in some mossy dell,
And heard the browsing wether's bell,
Blithe echoes rousing from their cell
To swell the tinkling choir;

"Or heard, from branch of flowering thorn,
The song of friendly cuckoo warn

The tardy-moving swain;

Hast bid the purple swallow hail,

And seen him now through ether sail,
Now sweeping downward o'er the vale,
And skimming now the plain;

"Then, catching with a sudden glance
The bright and silver-clear expanse
Of some broad river's stream,
Beheld the boats adown it glide,
And motion wind again the tide,
Where, chain'd in ice by Winter's pride,
Late roll'd the heavy team:

"Twas mine the warm, awakening hand,
That made thy grateful heart expand,
And feel the high control

Of Him, the mighty Power, that moves
Amid the waters and the groves,
And through his vast creation proves
His omnipresent soul.

the usual expression remain. His torchlight burial, at Mount Auburn, harmonized, in its beautiful solemnity, with the lofty and sweet tenor of his life.”—Tuckerman' Artist Life.

"Or, brooding o'er some forest rill,
Fringed with the early daffodil,

And quivering maiden-hair,

When thou hast mark'd the dusky bed,
With leaves and water-rust o'erspread,
That seem'd an amber light to shed
On all was shadow'd there;

"And thence, as by its murmur call'd,
The current traced to where it brawl'd
Beneath the noontide ray,

And there beheld the checker'd shade
Of waves, in many a sinuous braid,
That o'er the sunny channel play'd,
With motion ever gay:

"Twas I to these the magic gave,
That made thy heart, a willing slave,
To gentle Nature bend,

And taught thee how, with tree and flower,
And whispering gale, and dropping shower,
In converse sweet to pass the hour,

As with an early friend;

"That made thy heart, like His above,
To flow with universal love

For every living thing.

And, oh, if I, with ray divine,
Thus tempering, did thy soul refine,
Then let thy gentle heart be mine,

And bless the Sylph of Spring."

Of Mr Allston's fugitive poems, that which has been most praised is his ode entitled

AMERICA TO GREAT BRITAIN.1

All hail! thou noble land,

Our fathers' native soil!

Oh, stretch thy mighty hand,

Gigantic grown by toil,

O'er the vast Atlantic wave to our shore!
For thou with magic might

Canst reach to where the light
Of Phoebus travels bright

The world o'er.

The Genius of our clime,

From his pine-embattled steep,

Shall hail the guest sublime;

While the Tritons of the deep

Written in America, in the year 1810, and in 1817 inserted by Coleridge in the first edition of his "Sibylline Leaves," with the following note:-"This poem, written by an American gentleman, a valued and dear friend, I communicate to the reader for its moral no less than its poetic spirit."-Editor.