With the wild clangor of the warlike horn,
    The paltry fife, the brain-benumbing drum. 
    When, white Astraea! will thy kingdom come,—­
    The chaster period that our boyhood saw,—­
    Arts above arms, and without conquest, Law,—­
    Rights well maintained without the strength of steel
    And milder manners for the gentle weal,—­
    That Freedom’s promise may not come to blight,
    And Wisdom fail, and Knowledge end in night?

NEW HAVEN, August 8.

* * * * *

PAUL JONES AND DENIS DUVAL.

Ingham and his wife have a habit of coming in to spend the evening with us, unless we go there, or unless we both go to Haliburton’s, or unless there is something better to do elsewhere.

We talk, or we play besique, or Mrs. Haliburton sings, or we sit on the stoup and hear the crickets sing; but when there is a new Trollope or Thackeray,—­alas, there will never be another new Thackeray!—­all else has always been set aside till we have read that aloud.

When I began the last sentence of the last Thackeray that ever was written, Ingham jumped out of his seat, and cried,—­

“There, I said I remembered this Duval, and you made fun of me.  Go on,—­and I will tell you all about him, when you have done.”

So I read on to the sudden end:—­

“We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Captain Piercy.  And thus it came about, that, after being twenty-five days in His Majesty’s service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and desperate combats that have been fought in our or in any time.

“I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23d of September, which ended in our glorious captain striking his own colors to our superior and irresistible enemy.” (This enemy, as Mr. Thackeray has just said, is “Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards Knight of His Most Christian Majesty’s Order of Merit.”) “Sir Richard [Pearson, of the English frigate Serapis] has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fatal action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so fatally for us.  It did not commence till nightfall.  How well I remember the sound of the enemy’s gun, of which the shot crashed into our side in reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her!  Then came a broadside from us,—­the first I had ever heard in battle."[G]

Ingham did not speak for a little while.  None of us did.  And when we did, it was not to speak of Denis Duval, so much as of the friend we lost, when we lost the monthly letter, or at least, Roundabout Paper, from Mr. Thackeray.  How much we had prized him,—­how strange it was that there was ever a day when we did not know about him,—­how strange it was that anybody should call him cynical, or think men must apologize for him:—­of such things and of a thousand more we spoke, before we came back to Denis Duval.