triumphal gates, in a circumference of thirteen miles, enclosing the noble park of twenty-seven hundred acres, in which the castle stands, surrounded by the choicest beauties of forest and garden and fountain and lawn and stream. All that gold could buy, or the bounty of his own or foreign princes could bestow, or taste devise, or art execute, or ostentation could lavish, to perfect and adorn the all but regal structure, without and within, is there.

Its saloons and its galleries, its library and its museum, among the most spacious in England for a private mansion, are filled with the rarities and wonders of ancient and modern art. Eloquent inscriptions from the most gifted pens of the age set forth on triumphal arches and columns the exploits of him to whom the whole edifice and the domains which surround it are one gorgeous monument. Lest human adulation should prove unequal to the task, Nature herself has been called in to record his achievements. They have been planted, rooted in the soil. Groves and coppices, curiously disposed, represent the position, the numbers, the martial array of the hostile squadrons at Blenheim. Thus, with each returning year, Spring hangs out his triumphal banners. May's Eolian lyre sings of his victories through her gorgeous foliage; and the shrill trump of November sounds "Malbrook" through her leafless branches.

Twice in my life I have visited the magnificent residence,— not as a guest; once when its stately porticos afforded a grateful shelter from the noonday sun, and again, after thirty years' interval, when the light of a full harvest moon slept sweetly on the banks once shaded by fair Rosamond's bower,—so says tradition, -and poured its streaming bars of silver through the branches of oaks which were growing before Columbus discovered America. But to me, at noontide or in the evening, the gorgeous pile was as dreary as death, its luxurious grounds as melancholy as a churchyard.

It seemed to me, not a splendid palace, but a dismal mausoleum, in which a great and blighted name lies embalmed like some old Egyptian tyrant, black and ghastly in the asphaltic contempt of ages, serving but to rescue from an enviable oblivion the career and character of the magnificent peculator and miser and traitor to whom it is dedicated; needy in the midst of his ill-gotten millions; mean at the head of his victorious armies; despicable under the shadow of his thick-woven laurels; and

poor and miserable and blind and naked amidst the lying shams of his tinsel greatness. The eloquent inscriptions in Latin and English as I strove to read them seemed to fade from arch and column, and three dreadful words of palimpsestic infamy came out in their stead like those which caused the knees of the Chaldæan tyrant to smite together, as he beheld them traced by no mortal fingers on the vaulted canopy which spread like a sky over his accursed revels; and those dreadful words were, Avarice, Plunder, Eternal Shame!

There is a modest private mansion on the banks of the Potomac, the abode of George Washington and Martha, his beloved, his loving, faithful wife. It boasts no spacious portal nor gorgeous colonnade, nor massy elevation, nor storied tower. The porter's lodge at Blenheim Castle, nay, the marble dog-kennels were not built for the entire cost of Mount Vernon. No arch nor column, in courtly English or courtlier Latin, sets forth the deeds and the worth of the Father of his Country; he needs them not; the unwritten benedictions of millions cover all the walls. No gilded dome swells from the lowly roof to catch the morning or evening beam; but the love and gratitude of united America settle upon it in one eternal sunshine.

From beneath that humble roof went forth the intrepid and unselfish warrior-the magistrate who knew no glory but his country's good; to that he returned happiest when his work was done. There he lived in noble simplicity; there he died in glory and peace. While it stands, the latest generations of the grateful children of America will make their pilgrimage to it as to a shrine; and when it shall fall, if fall it must, the memory and the name of Washington shall shed an eternal glory on the spot.

Washington in the flesh is taken from us; we shall never behold him as our fathers did; but his memory remains, and I say, let us hang to his memory. Let us make a national festival and holiday of his birthday; and ever, as the 22d of February returns, let us remember, that while with these solemn and joy ous rites of observance we celebrate the great anniversary, our fel'ow-citizens on the Hudson, on the Potomac, from the Southern plains to the Western lakes, are engaged in the same offices of gratitude and love.

Nor we, nor they alone-beyond the Ohio, beyond the Missis sippi, along that stupendous trail of immigration from East to

West, which, bursting into States as it moves westward, is already threading the Western prairies, swarming through the portals of the Rocky Mountains and winding down their slopes, the name and the memory of Washington on that gracious night will travel with the silver queen of heaven through sixty degrees of longitude, nor part company with her till she walks in her brightness through the Golden Gate of California, and passes serenely on to hold midnight court with her Australian stars. There, and there only, in barbarous archipelagoes, as yet untrodden by civilized man, the name of Washington is unknown; and there too, when they swarm with enlightened millions, due honors shall be paid with ours to his memory.

CALHOUN.

JOHN C. CALHOUN was born in Abbeville District, South Carolina, March 18, 1782. Until his twentieth year, his education was pursued under peculiar difficulties, a village academy, fifty miles distant from his home-which he attended but a short time-and a circulating library of no great extent, being the main sources. And yet, it is not improbable, that the authors he met with in this humble library, such as Rollins, Robertson, Voltaire, and Locke, had not a little to do with forming that severe, critical, and logical development of mind which so strongly marked him in after life; and it is quite certain that from his father's lips he received the substance, at least, of those peculiar political views, which afterwards he so sedulously and ably elaborated in the halls of Congress.

In 1802 he entered Yale College. He afterwards studied. law at Litchfield, and was admitted to the bar in 1807. He entered public life in 1808, as a member of the South Carolina Legislature, and three years afterwards was elected to the National House of Representatives. His public stations were both many and distinguished, comprehending those of Secretary of War and of State, Vice-President and Senator. The latter he held at the time of his death, which occurred at Washington, March 31, 1850.

"In his personal character, Calhoun was of great purity and simplicity. His mode of life on his plantation at Fort Hill was simple and unostentatious, but ever warmhearted and hospitable."*

"I have known no man who wasted less of life in what is called recreation, or employed less of it in any pursuit not connected with the immediate discharge of his duty.

*Duyck inck's Cyclopædia of American Literature.

He seemed to have no recreation but the pleasure of con versation with his friends.

"His eloquence was part of his intellectual character. It was plain, strong, terse, condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned, still always severe. Rejecting ornament, not often seeking far for illustration, his power consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the closeness of his logic, and in the earnestness and energy of his manner.”*

AN EXTRACT OF A SPEECH ON THE OREGON BILL.

DELIVERED IN THE SENATE, JUNE 27, 1848.

SOCIETY can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race can exist, and all his faculties be fully developed. Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty, or freedom, must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of society are as paramount to individual liberty, as the safety and well-being of the race is to that of individuals; and, in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount to individual liberty.

On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen, or subject, in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man,— the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies.

It follows, from all this, that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must, necessarily, be very unequal among different people, according to their different conditions. For, just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve * Daniel Webster, in the Senate, April 1, 1850.