been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye.”  He was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll.  But he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy.  He did not suppose that the Duke of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only “the rough and incorrect papers” constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr. Lawrence, about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to deliver back.  He had forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and corrected by himself.

This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated to attract attention.  Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his last words.  Pitt read it with delight, and declared it to be a model in that style of composition.  But his latest biographer says of it, that “it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever wrote the ’Observations on the Conduct of the Minority.’  It is certainly the least pleasing of all his compositions."[A] In style, it is direct, terse, and compact, beyond any other composition of Burke’s.  Perhaps, as it was not intended for the public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence.  But the manuscript now before us exhibits the minute care with which it was executed.  Here also may be traced varieties of expression, constituting the different forms which a thought assumed, not unlike the various drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.

[Footnote A:  Macknight, Vol.  III. p. 532.]

But we must stop.  It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now dealing with this relic.

HARVARD’S HEROES.

The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London cannot fail to notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the choir.  It is composed of rare and costly marbles and other precious stones.  But, beautiful and fitting as it is, its greatest value lies in the circumstance which placed it there.  It is a memorial, the tribute of affection.  It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms to a noble officer of the Indian army.  Yet this, from its position a [Greek:  ktema es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller in England meets at every turn.  In public squares, in parish churches, in stately cathedrals,—­wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be arrested, whereever the pride of country is most deeply stirred, wherever the sentiment of loyalty is consecrated by religion,—­the Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names of his honored dead.  There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense local pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the scenes of their early lives.