As soon as we have passed by Van Buren's somewhat enigmatic figure, an oppressive dulness settles down upon the occupants of our gallery, and we have to look forward to one bright tall form at the end in order to resume with any cheerfulness the survey of their uninteresting physiognomies, amongst which the soldierly countenance of General Taylor, seen as it were but in profile, alone detaches itself with any distinctness. And yet there is more behind these dull faces than behind the far nobler ones of their predecessors. These mediocre Presidents are as screens placed before the fiery furnace of their country's internal development. They are utterly incapable of making its history; but its history is making itself rapidly under their nominal control.

Of the first in the list, WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, of Ohio, a Virginian by birth, and thereby the fifth Virginian President (born 1773, died 1841), a few words will suffice, seeing his Presidency lasted but thirty-three days. His name was great, especially in what was then the wild West (now not even the centre of the Union), and some foolish taunt flung out against him by a Democratic paper (for his election represents a temporary Whig triumph), gave his supporters the unusual advanNo. 73.-VOL. XIII.

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tage of a popular cry in his favour, and caused his return-in the midst of the "log cabin and hard cider mania," pleasantly described by a late Secessionist writer-as a backwoods champion. But he was in fact a man of good family and education, son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, brought up to the medical profession, and who, besides a distinguished military career, in which he had won the victories, great at the time, of "Tippecanoe" over the Indians, of "the Thames over our General Procter, had sat in the House of Representatives, in the Senate of Ohio and of the United States, had been governor and lieutenant-governor of territories, and United States' Minister in Columbia. I have had the unprofitable curiosity of looking through his life, in one of those biographies which form a regular element in Presidential elections; and, whilst the perusal fully convinced me that he was a worthy and well-meaning old gentleman, I must say that I found in all his recorded speeches the same pompous mediocrity which marks his "Inaugural," sole record of his Presidential life, and thereby rested satisfied in the conclusion that the world lost but little by his early death. Whether it gained anything, considering who succeeded him, is another question.

B

Now first came into play that provision of the American Constitution which promotes the Vice-President to the Presidency on any vacancy during the quadrennial term of office.

JOHN TYLER, of Virginia (sixth Virginian President, born 1790, died 1862), stepped into General Harrison's place. The son, he too, of an old revolutionary patriot; a college graduate at seventeen, a barrister at nineteen, soon rising to large practice, member of his State Legislature at twenty-one, sent to Congress at twenty-six, Governor of Virginia, United States Senator, a candidate for the Vice Presidency in 1836, and finally Vice-President and President in 1841. Thus far evidently a most successful man; but all his life, as I collect, one of the most unstable and shifty of politicians. After supporting the election of John Quincy Adams, he opposed him in the senate; after censuring Jackson for his conduct in the Seminole war, he supported his election; then, turning against him, patronized South Carolina nullification, and voted alone against what was known as the "Force bill" for putting it down; spoke of the United States Bank as unconstitutional, and joined in the vote of censure upon Jackson for withdrawing the national deposits from it. Disgraceful as was the conduct of the Whig party-claiming to be constitutional and conservative-in supporting for the VicePresidency a former partizan of the nullification treason, they were richly repaid for it by the conduct of their protege in the Presidency. He quarrelled and squabbled with his Cabinet and with Congress; had four Secretaries of State in four years, and ended by throwing himself into the arms of Calhoun and the South. Under Southern threats of "Texas or Disunion," Texas was admitted as a State without consulting Mexico; and, though the wisdom and moderation of Lords Aberdeen and Ashburton obtained the settlement of various pending questions of boundary, &c. by the Ashburton treaty (10th August, 1842), England received impertinent pro-slavery despatches from two successive Southern

Secretaries of State, and was insulted in Mr. Tyler's last message to Congress by an insinuation that she only kept up her anti-slave-trade cruisers to furnish her West Indian colonies with so-called free negroes, but real slaves. Mr. Tyler, however, had bid in vain for popularity, and could not even, on the expiration of his substitutionary term of office, be renominated on his own account for the Presidency, which was transferred over the head of Henry Clay to the personage of jaw-breaking name mentioned in the next paragraph (1845). He withdraws into private life; turns up again during the Secession crisis in 1861, to preside over a "Peace Conference" of Virginia, which did no good, and ended, fitly enough, as a member of the Confederate Congress at Richmond.

Was his successor in the Presidency any better? JAMES KNOX POLK, of Tennessee (born 1795, died 1849), was chosen by the Democratic Convention, which nominated him (Calhoun proudly refusing to stand) as being a second-rate man, and certainly justified his title to the character. A North Carolinian by birth, his family, like Jackson's and Monroe's, were from the north of Ireland. He had sat in the Legislature of his State in Congress fourteen years, and had been Speaker of the House of Representatives during part of Jackson's and Van Buren's Presidencies (1835-9); then Governor of Tennessee. Take out from Jackson every single higher quality, and the caput mortuum which remains of self-willed ambition and unscrupulous pro-slavery partizanship represents pretty correctly James K. Polk as a politician. He took James Buchanan's ill-starred name for Secretary of State; and entered at once, in his enormously long "Inaugural,' upon a wonderful course of unscrupulous Southern insolence toward the world, bullying England on the Oregon boundary question, and Mexico, apparently for being as yet but partly eaten up by the American adventurers who had wrested Texas from her. England, however, had only to be coerced into a new boundary treaty (1846); but Mexico into a war. A thoroughly gal