We had hardly returned on board with our sad report, before an auction was held of the poor man’s clothes.  The captain had first, however, called all hands aft, and asked them if they were satisfied that everything had been done to save the man, and if they thought there was any use in remaining there longer.  The crew all said that it was in vain, for the man did not know how to swim, and was very heavily dressed.  So we then filled away and kept her off to her course.

* * * * *

=_Evert A. Duyckinck, 1816—._= (Manual, p. 502.)

Essay from “Arcturus.”

=_229._= NEWSPAPERS.

No one, it has been said, ever takes up a newspaper without interest, or lays it down without regret.  There is a deeper truth in this observation than at first thought strikes the mind; it is not the casual disappointment at the loss of fine writing, or the absence of particular topics of news, or the variety of subjects that dispel all deep-settled reflection; but a newspaper is in some measure a picture of human life, and we can no more read its various paragraphs with pleasure, than we can look back upon the events of any single day with, unmingled satisfaction....  A man may learn, sitting by his fireside, more than an angel would desire to know of human life, by reading well a single newspaper.  It is an instrument of many tones, running through the whole scale of humanity; from the lightest gayety to the gravest sadness; from the large interests of nations to the humblest affairs of the smallest individual.  On its single page we read of Births, Marriages, and Deaths; the daily, almost hourly, register of royalty, how it eat, walked, and laughed; and the single incident the world deems worth recording of the life of poverty—­how it died.  It is a picture of motley human life; a poet’s thought, or an orator’s eloquence in one column, and the condemnation of a pickpocket in another....

Doubtless it was a very satisfactory thing for a Roman poet, when the wind was quiet, to get an audience about him, under a portico, and unwind his well-written scroll for an hour or two; but there must have been a vast deal of secret machinery, and influence, and agitation, to keep up his name with the people.  The followers of Pythagoras, in another country, we know, said he had a golden leg, and this satisfied the people that his philosophy was divine.  Truly were they the dark ages before the invention of newspapers.  Besides, what became of literature when the poet’s voice in the public bath, or library, where he recited, was drowned by the din of arms?...