y Smith and the capture of a
fresh rebel governor, reducing us to the stature at which posterity
shall reckon us. Eminent contemporaneousness may see here how much
space will be allotted to it in the historical compends and biographical
dictionaries of the next generation. In artless irony the telegraph is
unequalled among the satirists of this generation. But this short-hand
diarist confounds all distinctions of great and little, and roils the
memory with minute particles of what is oddly enough called intelligence.
We read in successive paragraphs the appointment of a Provisional
Governor of North Carolina, whose fitness or want of it may be the
turning-point of our future history, and the nomination of a minister,
who will at most only bewilder some foreign court with a more
desperately helpless French than his predecessor. The conspiracy trial
at Washington, whose result will have absolutely no effect on the real
affairs of the nation, occupies for the moment more of the public mind
and thought than the question of reconstruction, which involves the
life or death of the very principle we have been fighting for these
four years.

Undoubtedly the event of the day, whatever it may be, is apt to become
unduly prominent, and to thrust itself obscuringly between us and the
perhaps more important event of yesterday, where the public appetite
demands fresh gossip rather than real news, and the press accordingly
keeps its spies everywhere on the lookout for trifles that become
important by being later than the last. And yet this minuteness of
triviality has its value also. Our sensitive sheet gives us every
morning the photograph of yesterday, and enables us to detect and to
study at leisure that fleeting expression of the time which betrays its
character, and which might altogether escape us in the idealized
historical portrait. We cannot estimate the value of the _items_ in our
daily newspaper, because the world to which they relate is too familiar
and prosaic; but a hundred years hence some Thackeray will find them
full of picturesque life and spirit. The "Chronicle" of the Annual
Register makes the England of the last century more vividly real to us
than any history. The jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the
walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their
feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and
deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers'