in
the Constitution as its epitaph. It is even so. No historian a
thousand years hence could show from that instrument that a single
slave was ever held under it.' ... 'Slavery now appeals to arms
because Freedom, in her slow but steady progress, has left no
informality--no flaw--which can be seized on to reverse the
decision she has gained in any higher court.'

The style of this book is remarkable. The wealth of simile which bursts
out genially and involuntarily is only paralleled by its strange
variety, recalling CARLYLE in pleasant, piquant singularity.
Its humor is irresistible; none the less so for being keenly satirical.
We regret that our limits forbid copious extracts from these treasures,
but do the more earnestly entreat the reader to buy the volume and make
himself familiar with it. Whoever our Virginian may be, he is a rising
star, well worth observing. We find him at times a gleaming
enthusiast,--a man burning with the spirit of the war, involuntarily
uttering the most thrilling passages of Scripture,--and again provoking
laughter by dry humor and cutting jests. Let the reader in illustration
take the following paragraphs in the same sequence in which they occur
in the original work.

'"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" said dying Julian the apostate.
The North may, _and will_, now collect the bones of her
great-browed children who yielded because she said yield; the
fallen pillars of her crumbled church; her children whose wounds
yet smoke fresh from the state of Slavery;--and broken now upon the
stone she so long refused, shall write as their epitaph.

_Vicisti Humanitas!_

(_The Privateer_.) 'A cry comes up to the ear of America,--a long,
piercing cry of amazement and indignation,--recognizable as one
which can come only when the profoundest depths of the human
pocket are stirred. The privateers are at large! They have taken
away my coffee, and I know not where they have laid it. They have
taken my India goods with swords and staves. For my first-class
ship they have cast lots!

'Was such depravity ever known before? So long as it was a human
soul, launched by God on the eternal sea, that they despised; so
long as it was only a few million bales of humanity captured; so
long as it was but the scuttling the hearts of mothers and fathers
and husbands and wives,--we remained