taken him for an aristocrat." It happened sometimes, when he was conversing with English politicians, that it was the American who defended the English system against the attacks of Englishmen; and so full of British prejudice was he, that, in Paris, he protested that a decent dinner could not be bought for money. Westminster Abbey woke all his veneration. He went into it, one morning, just as service was about beginning, and took his place among the worshippers. Those of our readers who have attended the morning service at an English 'cathedral on a week-day cannot have forgotten the ludicrous smallness of the congregation compared with the imposing array of official assistants. A person who has a little tincture of the Yankee in him may even find himself wondering how it can "pay" the British empire to employ half a dozen reverend clergymen and a dozen robust singers to aid seven or eight unimportant members of the community in saying their prayers. But John Randolph of Roanoke had not in him the least infusion of Yankee. Standing erect in the almost vacant space, he uttered the responses in a tone that was in startling contrast to the low mumble of the clergyman's voice, and that rose above the melodious amens of the choir. He took it all in most serious earnest. When the service was over, he said to his companion, after lamenting the hasty and careless manner in which the service had been performed, that he esteemed it an honor to have worshipped God in Westminster Abbey. As he strolled among the tombs, he came, at last, to the grave of two men who had often roused his enthusiasm. He stopped, and spoke: "I will not say, Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you stand is holy; but, look, sir, do you see those simple letters on the flagstones beneath your feet, P. and C. J. F. Here lie, side by side, the remains of the two great rivals, Pitt and Fox, whose memory so completely lives in history. No marble monuments are necessary to mark the spot where their bodies repose. There is more simple grandeur in those few letters than in all the surrounding monuments, sir." How more than English was all this! England had been growing away from and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves and his

W.

overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a great empire.

We ought not to have been surprised at the sympathy which the English Tories felt during the late war for their brethren in the Southern States of America. It was as natural as it was for the English Protestants to welcome the banished Huguenots. It was as natural as it was for Louis XIV. to give an asylum to the Stuarts. The traveller who should have gone, seven years ago, straight from an English agricultural county to a cotton district of South Carolina, or a tobacco county of Virginia, would have felt that the differences between the two places were merely external. The system in both places and the spirit of both were strikingly similar. In the old parts

of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, you had only to get ten miles from a railroad to find yourself among people who were English in their feelings, opinions, habits, and even in their accent. New England differs from Old England, because New England has grown: Virginia was English, because she had been stationary. Happening to be somewhat familiar with the tone of feeling in the South, the real South, or, in other words, the South ten miles from a railroad, - we were fully prepared for Mr. Russell's statement with regard to the desire so frequently expressed in 1861 for one of the English princes to come and reign over a nascent Confederacy. Sympathies and antipathies are always mutual when they are natural; and never was there a sympathy more in accordance with the nature of things, than that which so quickly manifested itself between the struggling Southern people and the majority of the ruling classes of Great Britain.

Mr. Randolph took leave of public life, after thirty years of service, not in the most dignified manner. He furnished another illustration of the truth of a remark made by a certain queen of Denmark, "The lady doth protest too much." Like many other gentlemen in independent circumstances, he had been particularly severe upon those of his fellow-citizens who earned their subsistence by serving the public. It pleased him to speak of members of the Cabinet as "the drudges of

the departments," and to hold gentlemen in the diplomatic service up to contempt as forming "the tail of the corps diplomatique in Europe." He liked to declaim upon the enormous impossibility of his ever exchanging a seat in Congress for "the shabby splendors" of an office in Washington, or in a foreign mission "to dance attendance abroad instead of at home." When it was first buzzed about in Washington, in 1830, that General Jackson had tendered the Russian mission to John

Randolph, the rumor was not credited. An appointment so exquisitely absurd was supposed to be beyond even Andrew Jackson's audacity. The offer had been made, however. Mr. Randolph's brilliant defence of General Jackson's bad spelling, together with Mr. Van Buren's willingness to place an ocean between the new administration and a master of sarcasm, to whom opposition had become an unchangeable habit, had dictated an offer of the mission, couched in such seductive language that Mr. Randolph yielded to it as readily as those ladies accept an offer of marriage who have often announced their intention never to marry. Having reached the scene of his diplomatic labors at the beginning of August, he began to perform them with remarkable energy. In a suit of black, the best, he declared, that London could furnish, he was presented to the Emperor and to the Empress, having first submitted his costume to competent inspection. Resolute to do his whole duty, he was not content to send his card to the diplomatic corps, but, having engaged a handsome coach and four, he called upon each member of the diplomatic body, from the ambassadors to the secretaries of legation. Having performed these labors, and having discovered that a special object with which he was charged could not then be accomplished, he had leisure to observe that St. Petersburg, in the month of August, is not a pleasant residence to an invalid of sixty. describes the climate in these terms:

....

He

"Heat, dust impalpable, pervading every part and pore. . . . . Insects of all nauseous descriptions, bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, flies innumerable, gigantic as the empire they inhabit, who will take no denial. This is the land of Pharaoh and his plagues,-Egypt and its ophthalmia and vermin, without its fertility, - Holland, without its wealth, improvements, or cleanliness."

He endured St. Petersburg for the space of ten days, then sailed for England, and never saw Russia again. When the appropriation bill was before Congress at the next session, opposition members did not fail to call in question the justice of requiring the people of the United States to pay twenty thousand dollars for Mr. Randolph's ten days' work, or, to speak more exactly, for Mr. Randolph's apology for the President's bad spelling; but the item passed, nevertheless. During the reign of Andrew Jackson, Congress was little more than a board of registry for the formal recording of his edicts. There are those. who think, at the present moment, that what a President hath done, a President may do again.

It was fortunate that John Randolph was in retirement when Calhoun brought on his Nullification scheme. The presence in Congress of a man so eloquent and so reckless, whose whole heart and mind were with the Nullifiers, might have prevented the bloodless postponement of the struggle. He was in constant correspondence with the South Carolina leaders, and was fully convinced that it was the President of the United States, not "the Hamiltons and Haynes" of South Carolina, who ought to seize the first pretext to concede the point in dispute. No citizen of South Carolina was more indignant than he at General Jackson's Proclamation. He said that, if the people did not rouse themselves to a sense of their condition, and "put down this wretched old man," the country was irretrievably ruined; and he spoke of the troops despatched to Charleston as "mercenaries," to whom he hoped "no quarter would be given." The wretched old man" whom the people were to "put down" was Andrew Jackson, not John C. Calhoun.

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We do not forget that, when John Randolph uttered these words, he was scarcely an accountable being. Disease had reduced him to a skeleton, and robbed him of almost every attribute of man except his capacity to suffer. But even in his madness he was a representative man, and spoke the latent feeling of his class. The diseases which sharpened his temper unloosed his tongue; he revealed the tendency of the Southern mind, as a petulant child reveals family secrets. In his good and in his evil he was an exaggerated Southerner of the higher class. He was like them, too, in this: they are not criminals

to be punished, but patients to be cured. Sometimes, of late, we have feared that they resemble him also in being incurable.

As long as Americans take an interest in the history of their country, they will read with interest the strange story of this sick and suffering representative of sick and suffering Virginia. To the last, old Virginia wore her ragged robes with a kind of grandeur which was not altogether unbecoming, and which to the very last imposed upon tory minds. Scarcely any one could live among the better Southern people without liking them; and few will ever read Hugh Garland's Life of John Randolph, without more than forgiving all his vagaries, impetuosities, and foibles. How often, upon riding away from a Southern home, have we been ready to exclaim, "What a pity such good people should be so accursed!" Lord Russell well characterized the evil to which we allude as "that fatal gift of the poisoned garment which was flung around them from the first hour of their establishment."

The last act of John Randolph's life, done when he lay dying at a hotel in Philadelphia, in June, 1833, was to express once more his sense of this blighting system. Some years before, he had made a will by which all his slaves were to be freed at his death. He would probably have given them their freedom before his death, but for the fact, too evident, that freedom to a black man in a Slave State was not a boon. The slaves freed by his brother, forty years before, had not done well, because (as he supposed) no land had been bequeathed for their support. Accordingly, he left directions in his will that a tract of land, which might be of four thousand acres, should be set apart for the maintenance of his slaves, and that they should be transported to it and established upon it at the expense of his estate. "I give my slaves their freedom," said he in his will," to which my conscience tells me they are justly entitled." On the last day of his life, surrounded by strangers, and attended by two of his old servants, his chief concern was to make distinctly known to as many persons as possible that it was really his will that his slaves should be free. Knowing, as he did, the aversion which his fellowcitizens had to the emancipation of slaves, and even to the presence in the State of free blacks, he seemed desirous of tak