Enough that he lives, a dear and precious memory, in the hearts of those he left behind. As for his cause, time will vindicate that as surely as God lives and reigns. Twenty-three years ago the blood of my brother, slain in these streets, ran down and mingled with the waters of the mighty river which sweeps past your city to the sea

"The Avon to the Severn runs,

The Severn to the sea-
And scattered wide as Wycliffe's name,
Shall Wycliffe's ashes be.'"

low completely the brother's prediction has been fulfilled, I need not say. The cause for which Lovejoy died has been vindicated and by tremendous events, to which his death materially contributed. That murder was an enormous blunder as well as an inexcusable crime. It not only intensified the hostility of the radical Abolitionists, and gave them many recruits they would not otherwise have had; but it crystallized the conservative Anti-Slavery sentiment of the North, and widened and deepened the gulf of sectional antagonism through which, twentyfour years later, poured the mingled blood and tears of civil war. Wendell Phillips alone — whose dedication to Abolitionism dates from that blunder and crime-did tenfold more for the root-and-branch destruction of slavery, than Lovejoy could have done had he been permitted to publish his paper in St. Louis or Alton as long as he chose. He was killed for pointing out the evils of slavery, and urging gradual emancipation as the remedy. Instead of this peaceful remedy, slavery was abolished by fire and sword. and at a cost, in money alone, which would have bought every human chattel at the highest market price, and furnished him with a small capital to begin life anew as his own master.

Slavery has gone forever; not as Lovejoy would have had it go-but it has gone. And while to-day there is not, in all the land, a single slave; so there is not, I hope and I believe, a place in all the land where any man may not speak, write, publish, whatever he pleases on any subject being amenable to the laws of his country for the same.

What I have now to say has an unpleasant flavor of personality, which, I trust, will be pardoned for the sake of

the subject matter.

More than forty

years ago, with a companion somewhat older than myself, I sought and found the grave of Lovejoy. It was then between two quite large oak trees, and was identified by a small pine board, on which was rudely carved the initials, “ E. P. L.” The present city cemetery of Alton was then an open common. When it was laid out and enclosed, trees and board disappeared, and the main avenue passed directly over the grave, the location of which would have been hopelessly lost but for the late William Brudon, superintendent of the cemetery, who marked the spot by two fragments of limestone, almost on a level with the ground, of which very few knew the meaning. After being thus trodden under foot by man and beast for several years, the late Major Charles W. Hunter had the remains removed to where they now are — just outside his own family lot, but in ground then owned by him. William Johnston, a colored man born in Scotland, who had buried Lovejoy the first time, had charge of this removal. Somewhere among my papers I have his receipt for money paid "for burying Lovejoy twice." He told me that some bits of bone and handsful of dust were all he could find.

The second grave, when

I first knew it, was marked by an old tombstone turned upside down, across the upper edge of which was written in red chalk, "Lovejoy." At a later day, when circumstances, needless to mention, made the great principle of free speech and free press very dear to me, I placed upon the grave the present simple monument

a scroll of Italian marble, resting upon a pedestal of New England granite, and bearing this inscription:

HIC JACET LOVEJOY. Jam parce sepulto.

"Here lies Lovejoy. Spare him now that he is buried."

A longer and better epitaph might and would be written now, but then these few words seemed to me appropriate and enough. Before doing this, however, I

1 The monument was erected in July, 1863.

endeavored to communicate with Lovejoy's son, Edward; but my letters and inquiries never reached him, or, at least, were never answered. Consequently, I was obliged to assume that neither he nor other relatives had any objection to my labor of love, and I have heard of none from any quarter since. The heirs of Major Hunter cheerfully gave me a deed to the lot for the purpose to which it is dedicated. Taking into consideration my non-residence and the necessity of having some person, or persons, to exereise the rights and perform the duties of ownership when I have "gone over to the majority" I formally transferred all my right, title, and interest in the lot and contents to the colored people of Alton in August, 1885. It was accepted by them, and they are now the legitimate custodians of that sacred sod; yes, sacred, for

"Such graves as this are pilgrim shrines-
Shrines to no code or creed confined;
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind."

There have been several attempts to erect a suitable monument to Lovejoy. The city of Alton has set apart a welllocated and spacious lot in the cemetery for that purpose, and a "monument as

sociation " has been organized and duly incorporated under the laws of Illinois. So I have no doubt there will be, sooner or later, a monument worthy of the man and his deeds; but I do not expect to live to see it. My only desire has been to make the surroundings of the present grave a little more attractive, and this has lately been done by the erection of a neat stone wall and coping.1

As an appropriate conclusion, I reproduce a note and accompanying verses sent me several years ago by one of our ablest young journalists, whose modesty will not permit me to name :

"MY DEAR MR. DIMMOCK: -Your selection of

this quotation-the words uttered by the unquiet spirit of Polydorus, when Eneas ignorantly disturbed his rest - for the epitaph of Lovejoy brings home to me as it perhaps never would have been brought otherwise, the full strength of that episode in the Æneid. In bringing Æneas to the Thracian coast, Virgil could have had no other object than to introduce into a poem whose plot in no other

The money paid for the work-about $105-was raised by voluntary subscription immediately after the delivery of my address in the Church of the Unity, St. Louis, March 14, 1888, from which address this article is mainly

drawn.

written by Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy, published in I am chiefly indebted for my material to the "Memoir," New York in 1838, and long since out of print. Some assistance has been derived from "The Martyrdom of Lovejoy," by Henry Tanner, Chicago, 1881. The new

matter, of which there is considerable, is from entirely reliable sources.

way required it, the lines in which he has embodied the idea we have in Genesis, when Abel's blood is made to cry out from the ground. As was lawful for him, under classic ideas of poetic probability, he worked a miracle to reveal the murder. The spears with which the body of the murdered Polydorus has been transfixed, sticking above the surface of the hastily-made grave, take root and grow. Their sap is his blood, and when a branch of them is broken, blood flows in witness of the crime. Perhaps had Virgil lived to complete the Eneid, he would have given us in his poem the same exemplification of poetic justice that you have given us in quoting from it for the epitaph of the man from whose murder results have followed which fulfil all the canons of that law. Since through you came to me the suggestion giving me a realization of the meaning of the passage-I hope your indulgence for the lines in which I have attempted to embody it:

THE SPEARS OF POLYDORUS.
Jam parce sepulto.

Whose iron tablets, graven deep, was vengeance for the sin.

An awful page of fire and blood, of battle and of tears,

Told there how she had heeded it- the Story of the Spears.

*

She sent her fools in after times to rend away a branch,

And underneath her darkening skies flowed blood they might not stanch.

In fearful tones a mighty voice spoke from beneath the sod,

For justice and for vengeance appealing to the God

And at its call through all the land the crowding thousands came;

And at its call shone in the heaven the guiding cloud of flame;

And at its call from East and West they marshalled for the strife

That gave five hundred thousand lives in payment for that life.

While the simoon that southward swept through all those bitter years,

Bore on its blast from Lovejoy's grave the War Song of the Spears.

Calmed at last is its wild music, sunk to a requiem low

Lulling his restless spirit with its cadence sad and slow;

But in all its changing symphonies, its pleas for blood or tears,

There sounds for all the ages the Warning of the Spears

Or whispered now, or thundered then, the message is divine

"Think not 'tis yours to cheat Me of the vengeance that is mine."

D

OWN at the foot of Seventeenth Street, away from the usual route of the guide-book sightseer, stands the oldest house in Washington. The moss had grown thick upon its humble roof long before quarrelling Congresses wrangled and disputed over the location. of the future "Federal City," and when at last the dispute was ended, and a definite site selected, it was found that the unpretentious home and paternal acres of a sturdy old Scotchman, David Burns by name, occupied a large portion of the proposed situation.

Of the previous history of the Burns family little is known or recorded beyond the statement that the estate had descended to David through several generations of Scottish ancestors; all, probably, farmer folk like himself. They were, no doubt, a part of the same thrifty Scotch

element that had contributed so much to the colonial prosperity of Maryland and Virginia, and which had borne so large a share in the founding and building of Georgetown and Alexandria.

The homestead itself was located almost upon the immediate bank of the Potomac, here a mile or more in width, and only a little distance away from the beautiful hill upon which the Observatory now stands the hill upon which, it is related, Braddock's forces camped on their first night out from Alexandria, in that ill-starred march into the wilderness, and the enthusiast has even drawn a beautiful though doubtless imaginary picture of the youthful Virginia captain looking out from that historic camping ground, and, with prophetic vision, locating here the unborn metropolis of an unborn Republic.

The farm itself stretched away from the river front northwardly, to include the ground upon which are now the White House, the Treasury, the State, War, and Navy Departments, Lafayette Square, and a large part of what is now known as the "West End." A barn stood near where the White House was after wards built, and down to 1805, Lafayette Square was known as the " Burns Orchard"; in one corner of it was the parish burial-ground of St. John's Church.

The original land patent of the Burns holding bears date 1681, and in the quaint phraseology of that day describes the property as "the Widow's Mite, lying on the east side of the Anacostin River, on the north side of a branch or inlet in the said river, called Tyber."

The chronicles are silent as to whether David Burns were of Whig or Tory proclivities during the Revolutionary troubles, but it is certain that his patriotism did not extend to the point of willingly surrendering his ancestral acres to the furtherance of a scheme which doubtless seemed visionary and unpromising to his practical Scotch judgment.

In this day, after a century's growth and prosperity, it is well-nigh impossible for us to conceive just how uncertain, unreal, and intangible must have seemed the personality of the new "Government," with whose fortunes the canny, cautious Scotsman was invited to cast in his worldly all. Notwithstanding Maryland had surrendered him to the new and stranger power, he utterly refused to acquiesce, and so sturdily stood out against the great Washington himself, as to cause the latter to write him down for future history as "the obstinate Mr. Burns." The doctrine of eminent domain was doubtless new to poor David, and although in this instance it brought golden fortune to his door, it quite failed to assimilate with his ingrained ideas of meum and teum. At last the patience of Washington was exhausted, and he intinated to the testy freeholder that the government would take his farm whether he consented or not, and concluded his emphatic remarks by inquiring, "On what terms will you surrender your plantation?" And the humbled Scotchman, seeing he had reached the end of his