My task is ended; may it not have been performed in vain!

* * * * *

JOHN ANDRE AND HONORA SNEYD.

Many of our readers will remember the exquisite lines in which Beranger paints the connection between our mortal lives and the stars of the sky.  With every human soul that finds its way to earth, a new gem is added to the azure belt of heaven.  Thenceforth the two exist in mutual dependence, each influencing the other’s fate; so that, when death comes to seal the lips of the man, a flame is paled and a lamp extinguished in the gulf above.  In every loosened orb that shoots across the face of night the experienced eye may trace the story and the fall of a fellow-being.  Youth, beauty, wealth, the humility of indigence and the pride of power, alike find their term revealed in the bright, silent course of the celestial spark; and still new signs succeed to provoke the sympathy or dazzle the philosophy of the observer.

     “Quelle est cette etoile qui file,
     Qui file, file, et disparait?”

It is unfortunate that such a pretty manner of accounting for the nature and origin of falling stars should be unsustained by sound astronomical data, and utterly discountenanced by Herschel and Bond.  There is something in the theory very pleasant and very flattering to human nature; and there are passages in the history of our race that might make its promulgation not unacceptable.  When, among the innumerable “patines of bright gold” that strew the floor of heaven, we see one part from the sphere of its undistinguished fellows, and, filling its pathway with radiant light, vanish noiselessly into annihilation, we cannot but be reminded of those characters that, with no apparent reason for being segregated from the common herd, are, through some strange conjuncture, hurried from a commonplace life by modes of death that illuminate their memory with immortal fame.  It is thus that the fulfilment of the vow made in the heat of battle has given Jephthah’s name a melancholy permanence above all others of the captains of Israel.  Mutius would long ago have been forgotten, among the thousands of Roman soldiers as brave as he, and not less wise, who gave their blood for the good city, but for the fortunate brazier that stood in the tent of his enemy.  And Leander might have safely passed and repassed the Hellespont for twenty years without leaving anything behind to interest posterity; it was failure and death that made him famous.

Eighty years ago a tragedy was consummated by the river Hudson, which, in the character of its victim and the circumstances of his story, goes far to yield another example to the list of names immortalized by calamity.  On the 2d of October, 1780, a young British officer of undistinguished birth and inconsiderable rank was hanged at Tappan.  Amiable as his private life was, and respectable as were his professional