“Verse sweetens toil—­”

says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is so good that I will transcribe the whole of it—­

  “Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound—­
    All at her work the village maiden sings,
  Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around,
    Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things.”

Verse it seems can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory.

“We encourage their singing as much as we can,” said the brother of the proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us, and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; “we encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing.  Sometimes they will sing all day long with great spirit; at other times you will not hear a single note.  They must sing wholly of their own accord, it is of no use to bid them do it.”

“What is remarkable,” he continued, “their tunes are all psalm tunes, and the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred music; they will sing nothing else.  Almost all these persons are church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so.  Most of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists.”

I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these people worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of the constitution.  It has a congregation of twenty-seven hundred persons, and the best choir, I heard somebody say, in all Richmond.  Near it is the Monumental church, erected on the site of the Richmond theatre, after the terrible fire which carried mourning into so many families.

In passing through an old part of Main-street, I was shown an ancient stone cottage of rude architecture and humble dimensions, which was once the best hotel in Richmond.  Here, I was told, there are those in Richmond who remember dining with General Washington, Judge Marshall, and their cotemporaries.  I could not help comparing it with the palace-like building put up at Richmond within two or three years past, named the Exchange Hotel, with its spacious parlors, its long dining-rooms, its airy dormitories, and its ample halls and passages, echoing to the steps of busy waiters, and guests coming and departing.  The Exchange Hotel is one of the finest buildings for its purpose in the United States, and is extremely well-kept.

I paid a visit to the capitol, nobly situated on an eminence which overlooks the city, and is planted with trees.  The statue of Washington, executed by Houdon for the state of Virginia, in 1788, is here.  It is of the size of life, representing Gen. Washington in the costume of his day, and in an ordinary standing posture.  It gratifies curiosity, but raises no particular moral emotion.  Compared with the statue by Greenough, it presents a good example of the difference between the work of a mere sculptor—­skillful indeed, but still a mere sculptor—­and the work of a man of genius.