But let this great Republic drive into exile the wheat-growers of the West, the miners and iron-men of Pennsylvania, and the farmers of New England, as soon as these men who have created the cotton-crop which clothes a world, and who only wait for another stimulus to supersede the lash.  Let them find it, as in Jamaica, in a plot of ground, their seed and tools, their hearth-side and marriage, their freedom, and the shelter of a country which wants to use the products of their hands.

If it be an object to stretch a great band of free tropical labor across Central America, to people those wastes with ideas which shall curb the southward lust of men, and nourish a grateful empire against the intrigues of European States, let that be done, if the colored American of the Border States is willing to advance the project.  Let the project be clearly understood, and its prospective upholders frankly invited to become men, and aid their country’s welfare.  But never let colonization be opened like an artery, through whose “unkindest cut” some of the best blood of the country shall slip away and be lost forever.  We want the cotton labor even more extensively diffused, to conquer John Bull with bales, as at New Orleans.  Let no cotton-grower ever budge.

The Life and Letters of Washington Irving. By his Nephew, PIERRE M. IRVING.  Vols.  I and II.  New York:  G.P.  Putnam.

If to be loved and admired by all, to have troops of personal friends, to enjoy a literary reputation wide in extent and high in degree, to be as little stung by envy and detraction as the lot of humanity will permit, to secure material prosperity with only occasional interruptions and intermissions, make up the elements of a happy life, then that of Washington Irving must be pronounced one of the most fortunate in the annals of literature.  It is but repeating a trite remark to say that happiness depends more upon organization than upon circumstances, more upon what we are than upon what we have.  Saint-Simon said of the Duke of Burgundy, father of Louis XV., that he was born terrible:  it certainly may be said of Washington Irving that he was born happy.  Some men are born unhappy:  that is, they are born with elements of character, peculiarities of temperament, which generate discontent under all conditions of life.  Their joints are not lubricated by oil, but fretted by sand.  The contemporaries of Shakspeare, who for the most part had little comprehension of his unrivalled genius, expressed their sense of his personal qualities by the epithet gentle, which was generally applied to him,—­a word which meant rather more then than it does now, comprising sweetness, courtesy, and kindliness.  No one word could better designate the leading characteristics of Irving’s nature and temperament.  No man was ever more worthy to bear “the grand old name of gentleman,” alike in the essentials of manliness, tenderness, and purity, and in the external accomplishment of manners so winning and cordial that