have long maintained relations of peace and amity” with the United States.  England cannot officially recognize or aid the South without placing herself in a hostile attitude towards this country.  Yet meanwhile English capitalists can publicly subscribe to the loan which our enemies solicit, and from English ship-yards a fleet of iron-clad war-vessels can be sent to lay waste our commerce and break our blockade of Southern ports.  What the end will be no one may venture to foretell; but it needs no prophet to predict that many years will not obliterate from the minds of the American people the present policy of the English Cabinet, controlled as it is by the genius of English aristocracy.

* * * * *

THEODORE WINTHROP’S WRITINGS.

“The first time I saw Theodore Winthrop,” said one to me a few days ago, “he came into my office with a common friend.  They were talking as they entered, and Winthrop said, ’Yes, the fellows who came over in the Mayflower can’t afford to do that!’

“‘There,’ thought I to myself, ’there’s another of the Mayflower men!  I wish to my soul that ship had sunk on her voyage out!’ But when I came to know him, I quickly learned that with him origin was not a matter of vain pride, but a fact inciting him to all nobleness of thought and life, and spurring him on to emulate the qualities of his ancestor.”

That is to say, he was not a prig, or a snob, but a gentleman.  And if he remembered that he “came over in the Mayflower,” it was because he felt that that circumstance bound him to higher enterprises, to better work, than other men’s.  And he believed in his heart, as he wrote in the opening chapter of “John Brent,” that “deeds of the heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain our day.  There are men,” he continues, “as ready to gallop for love and strike for love now as in the age of Amadis.”  Ay, and for a nobler love than the love of woman—­for love of country, and of liberty—­he was ready to strike, and to die.

Ready to do, when the time came; but also—­what required a greater soul—­ready to wait in cheerful content till the fitting time should come.  Think of these volumes lying in his desk at home, and he, their author, going about his daily tasks and pleasures, as hearty and as unrepining as though no whisper of ambition had ever come to his soul,—­as though he had no slightest desire for the pleasant fame which a successful book gives to a young man.  Think of it, O race of scribblers, to whom a month in the printer’s hands seems a monstrous delay, and who bore publishers with half-finished manuscripts, as impatient hens begin, untimely, to cackle before the egg is laid.