quaintance of the late Alexander H. Ever-tance. We refer to the establishment of the ett, also an instructor there, whose sister railway system in New England and the inhe married 5 September, 1816, having troduction of pure water into the city of meanwhile, in 1810, removed to Boston Boston. Without denying to others their where in due time he had been admitted a fair share of credit either for priority or for member of the Suffolk bar. Mrs. Hale influence in these undertakings, it will not survives him. be denied by any person conversant with the facts that the master spirit in every stage of their progress, from the inception of the idea in each case, to its successful fulfilment, was NATHAN HALE. He was the acting chairman and working member of the original board of internal improvements in Massachusetts under whose auspices the leading lines of our railways as they now exist were surveyed, and he was the first president of the Boston and Worcester, one of the earliest railways that was chartered, and the first on which a locomotive ran. He was a member, we believe, of every one of the many successive boards of water commissioners in Boston, excepting one, which by design was made to consist only of eminent engineers from other States, whose action was substantially to approve the plans proposed by Mr. Hale and his associates, and which were subsequently carried out by a board of which he was chairman.

Mr. Hale very early became actively interested in journalism, and his editorship of the Boston Daily Advertiser, beginning 1 March, 1814, is the fact in his life for which he would wish to be chiefly remembered. This was the first daily paper here published, and for many years the only one. In his hands it early gained an enviable character which made the name creditable in every part of the country. It is mentioned by Mr. Buckingham in his "Reminiscences" that Mr. Hale was the first journalist to introduce as a regular feature, editorial comments upon passing events and discussions of public topics. Formerly the newspapers had generally been conducted by printers who inserted articles from contributors under various signatures, without undertaking to express opinions of their own.

Mr. Hale also gave early attention to the mechanical part of the business of journalism, and was, we believe, the first in this part of the country to introduce steampower presses.

Mr. Hale was one of the club which founded the North American Review and of that which founded the Christian Examiner. In 1825 he prepared from the original authorities a map of New England, which still possesses a standard character. In 1828 he wrote a pamphlet upon the protective policy which attracted much attention both at home and abroad.

While engaged in his chosen vocation as a journalist with an indefatigable industry and with a feeling of personal responsibility to his readers, which he never forgot, and which scarcely permitted a day's absence from his office, Mr. Hale nevertheless found time to engage in numerous works of advantage to the community. His labors in these were disinterested. Among the great number in which he was actively engaged, in many of them as a pioneer, there are two which deserve to be especially remembered in connection with his name by reason of the prominent part which he had in them, and of their wide-spread and lasting impor

Mr. Hale entered the Legislature, serving in both houses, principally to urge these and kindred topics for the advantage of the public. He was likewise a member of the Convention of 1820 for the Revision of the Constitution, and in association with the late Octavius Pickering made the report of the proceedings of that body. He was also a member of the later convention, in 1853. The columns of his paper were used to urge with every variety of pertinent illustration and perspicuous argument, works of public advantage, which now seem so admirable and so necessary that one wonders argument was ever necessary to support them. But posterity will not forget the value of the services whereby these priceless blessings were obtained.

Mr. Hale had the supreme satisfaction of seeing these his cherished plans successfully in operation; and after a life full of labor, he has passed away, as we have said, to a world of rest without pain and without a struggle. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard College in 1853.

POETRY.-Waiting, 434. When Green Leaves come again, 434. Vespers, 434. The Looker-out, 480. Rejected Addresses, 480.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Horticulture Abroad, 470. Mr. Story's recent Works, 470.

Next Number will contain an admirable article on Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, by Mr. Kinglake, author of " Eothen."

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From The Quarterly Review.

Now it appears to us

- you must

I own has set him on.
that, granting all this to be true, the truth,
as Mrs. Gordon sets it forth, redounds very
little to her father's honor. You cannot call
him a great man who does even great things
only at the suggestion of others
pronounce him to be a very poor creature
indeed whom somebody else inveigles into
the perpetration of mean things and bad
things. But is it all true? Mrs. Gordon
declares that it is; and in order, we pre-
sume, to verify the assertion, she has used
her father's correspondence in a way which
that noble-minded person would have been
the first to condemn. There are letters
printed in these volumes which could not
possibly have been intended for other eyes
than those of the person to whom they were

where we find them with the worse grace that it was obviously not in Mrs. Gordon's power to favor us with her father's answers to them.

Christopher North: a Memoir of John Wilson. By his Daughter. Edinburgh, 1862. MRS. GORDON has not been well advised to become the biographer of her father. Over and above the considerations which usually forbid that a child should sit in judgment upon a parent, there are special reasons in Mrs. Gordon's case why she should have studiously held aloof from so delicate an enterprise. Mrs. Gordon is the wife of a gentleman who to various social qualities adds this, that, being the scion of a Whig family, he has, in a place where party feeling always runs high, from his youth upwards breathed an atmosphere of Whiggery. The wife, as is natural, adopts her husband's friends, and falls in with her husband's prejudices. It is scarcely possible for her, there-addressed; and which take their places fore, in writing the life of a Tory father, to look at the subject from first to last, except through a false medium. The hero of her tale, according to his daughter's showing, passes the better half of his days without Is it thus that the good name of a generous taking the smallest interest in politics, or and gifted man is to be vindicated? Is it not expressing any opinions on the subject. By rather by preserving his confidences, by reand by he is thrown among a knot of rabid specting his friendships, and by writing in a Edinburgh Tories, and, after wasting his spirit of which he would have approved? great powers for many years in advocating Nor is the strictly narrative portion of the their views, he subsides at last, when passion performance worthy of the subject with which has died out and judgment matured itself, it deals. Mrs. Gordon acknowledges many into moderate Whiggism. It seems more- obligations to Mr. Alexander Nicolson, Adover that, during the continuance of his vocate; but whatever may have been the Tory delusion, he is cruelly made use of by amount of aid rendered to her by that genthe agents of the faction for their own bad tleman, she has not succeeded in giving to purposes. Having a keen perception of the the world such a portraiture of her father as value of their prize, they seize it, and hold docs him common justice. Her account of it with a grasp which cannot be shaken off his childhood and early youth is neither more Certain obnoxious individuals throw their nor less than a rechauffee of some of the spell over him, whereupon his character, as papers in the "Recreations of Christopher well moral as intellectual, undergoes a North." Her story of his first love, and of frightful change. They persuade him to its influence upon his character and prosjoin them in a purely literary undertaking, pects, is mere silliness. Of the notice which and he is involved at once in the fiercest she takes of his literary life in Edinburgh, party polemics. His articles take, he can- we shall have more to say when the proper not tell how, a tone of bitter personality. If time comes, regretting sincerely that she he lend himself at any time and it is not should have imposed upon us so disagreeadenied that he often does lend himself to ble a task. Meanwhile it may not be amiss proceedings which outrage the laws of Edin- to lead up to that point by sketching very burgh decorum, it is always at the sugges- briefly the outlines of Wilson's career, till tion of somebody else. If with a too re- we find him first a briefless barrister in the morseless hand, for example, he demolish a Modern Athens, and then a contributor to cockney, or expose a charlatan, or strip the Blackwood's Magazine. mask from a hypocrite, or scarify a pretender, another spirit more wicked than his

John Wilson, the eldest son but fourth child of his parents, was born in Paisley on