nerally find such saints
disagreeable enough to deserve banishment,)--nor that Oliver Holmes was
whipped for being a Baptist,--nor that William Robinson and Marmaduke
Stevenson were hung on the Common as Antinomians and heretics,--nor that
a Frenchman, who was _suspected_ of setting a fire near the dock, which
consumed eighty buildings, was sentenced to stand in the pillory, to
have both ears cut off, pay charges of court, give five hundred pounds
bonds with sureties, and stand committed till sentence was performed. We
must also suspect the early English traveller, Mr. Ward, of a little
Old-Country prejudice, when he writes of Boston,--"The buildings, like
their women, are neat and handsome; and their streets, like the hearts
of their men, are paved with pebbles. They have four churches, built
with clapboards and shingles, and supplied with four ministers,--one a
scholar, one a gentleman, one a dunce, and one a clown. The captain of a
ship met his wife in the street after a long voyage, and kissed her, for
which he was fined ten shillings. What a happiness, thought I, do we
enjoy in Old England, where we can not only kiss our own wives, but
other men's, without a danger of penalty!" Unquestionably Boston was no
place for Mr. Ward, and Mr. Ward not at all the man for Boston. Yet,
with an occasional blemish and many a casualty, the record is also one
of good works and alms-deeds.

Reading the Police Recollections is like peering down through a crevice
into some subterranean cavern, where an intense convulsive activity
prevails without ceasing, day and night. The actors seem scarcely to be
men and women, but such puppets as dance on electric machines, of
movements too swift and sudden for human beings, too reckless,
eccentric, and apparently inconsequent for moral beings. A certain
phenomenal life they have, a fitful flare of gusty, fierce existence,
and then the instant flicker and fading into extinction. Yet the
philanthropist remembers, with a sigh, that these are living souls,
children of the same Father as himself, amenable to the same laws,
accountable at the same judgment-seat; and the practical question bears
down upon him with ever-increasing force, How shall these outcasts of
society be brought into the Father's house?

More hopeless than the Pariahs are the Brahmins of our
heathenism,--those miserable men whose corrupt lives are glossed over
with a varnish of respectability. Church, assembly, and drawing-room s