n attempting a _populacity_
(we must coin a new word for a new thing) for which he was exquisitely
unfitted. What more stiffly awkward than his essays at easy
familiarity? What more painfully remote from drollery than his efforts
to be droll? In the case of a man who descends so far as Mr. Seward,
such feats can be characterized by no other word so aptly as by
tumbling. The thing would be sad enough in any prominent man, but in
him it becomes a public shame, for in the eyes of the world it is the
nation that tumbles in its Prime Minister. The Secretary of State's
place may be dependent on the President, but the dignity of it belongs
to the country, and neither of them has any right to trifle with it.
Mr. Seward might stand on his head in front of what Jenkins calls his
"park gate," at Auburn, and we should be the last to question his
perfect right as a private citizen to amuse himself in his own way, but
in a great officer of the government such pranks are no longer
harmless. They are a national scandal, and not merely so, but a
national detriment, inasmuch as they serve to foster in foreign
statesman a profound misapprehension of the American people and of the
motives which influence them in questions of public policy. Never was
so great a wrong done to democracy, nor so great an insult offered to
it, as in this professional circuit of the presidential Punch and his
ministerial showman.

Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair, and their passing
round the hat without catching even the greasy pence they courted,
have very little to do with the great question to be decided at the
next elections, except in so far as we may be justified in suspecting
their purity of motive who could consent to such impurity of means,
and the soundness of their judgment in great things who in small ones
show such want of sagacity. The crowds they have drawn are no index of
popular approval. We remember seeing the prodigious nose of Mr. Tyler
(for the person behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle
to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets,
and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the
man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But
then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside
him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of
Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud.
Even