ndly eye,
His spirit did not all depart.

"The words of fire that from his pen
He flung upon the lucid page
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age.

"His love of Truth, too warm, too strong,
For Hope or Fear to chain or chill,
His hate of tyranny and wrong,
Burn in the breasts they kindled still."

So lived and died William Leggett. What a rebuke of party perfidy, of
political meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues,
comes up from his grave! How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons
at the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollow
pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands
to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in
chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,
and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,
shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his
character! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man
who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his
friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of
poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,

"A fame by scandal untouched,
To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."

The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are
their own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave is
written over with the record of their hypocrisy.

We have written rather for the living than the dead. As one of that
proscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravely
defended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinary
gratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at the
present time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of which
we have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in the
hearts of the young democracy of our country. Democracy such as William
Leggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-
comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faith
of this republic. Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name,
and offered the strange incense of human te