times borne away the palm of being the true author.

Assuming this as the probable fact, we shall, after giving a general notion of the work, transcribe certain passages that struck us in the reading. Icon Basilike was published a few days after the king's death, and was received with "general compassion, excited towards the king by the publishing, at so critical a juncture, a work so full of piety, meekness, and humanity." So writes a distinguished admirer of the royal author. It is contained in twentyeight sections-historical, political, personal, and religious. It contains materials for party history and biographical criticism. It is the sketch of an historical painting, afterwards filled in and colored by a master.-(Clarendon.) It is elegantly written throughout, with occasional passages of classic eloquence and refined sentiment. It is devout; a confession of faith. It passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth, owing to very apparent reasons. It was thought, long afterwards, to have been the remote cause of the restoration of the house of Stuart. Milton compares its effects upon the nation, as Hume asserts, (we cannot turn to the passage itself,) to those which were wrought on the tumultuous Romans by Antony's reading to them the will of Cæsar;-the allusion of a scholar, and the prescient sagacity of a statesman combined. Let the following passages, if not altogether verifying these high encomiums, stand for what they deserve; at least, as evidences of purity of style, and elevation with refinement of thought. These sentences have a point worthy of Selden, in his Table Talk:

"Some kind of zeal counts all merciful moderation, lukewarmness; and had rather be cruel than counted cold, and is not seldom more greedy to kill the bear for his skin than for any harm he hath done."

"I ever thought that the proud ostenta tion of men's abilities for invention, and the vain affectations of variety for expressions, in public prayers or any sacred administrations, merits a greater brand of sin, than that which they call coldness and barrenness; nor are men in these matters less subject to formal and superficial tempers (as to their hearts) than in the use of constant forms, when not the words but men's hearts are to blame."

"In devotions I love neither profane boldness, nor pious nonsense; but such an

humble and judicious gravity, as shows the speaker both at once considerate of God's majesty, the Church's honor, and his own vileness; both knowing what things God allows him to ask, and in what manner it becomes a sinner to supplicate the Divine Mercy for himself and others. I confess I am better pleased, as with studied and premeditated sermons as with such public forms of prayer, as are fitted to the churches and every Christian's daily and common necessities. Though the light of the understanding, and the fervency of affection, I hold the main and most necessary requisites both in constant and occasional, solitary and social devotions."

The religion of the dissenters :

"A great part of whose piety hung upon that popular pin of railing against, and contemning the government of this

church. But I had rather be condemned

to the wo of Va soli, than to that of Væ vobis, hypocritæ, by seeming to pray what I do not approve."

Of Royalty and Episcopacy:

sacerdotal, might well become the same "Indeed, I think both offices, regal and person; as ancient, they were under one name, and the united rights of primogeniture: nor could I follow better precedents, if I were able, than those two eminent kings, David and Solomon; not more famous for their seeptres and crowns, than one was for devout psalms and prayers; the other for his divine parables and preaching: whence the one merited and assumed the name of a prophet, the other of a preacher ;-titles, indeed, of greater honor, where rightly placed, than any of those the Roman Emperors affected from the nations they subdued; it being infinitely more glorious to convert souls to God's church by the word, than to conquer men to a subjection by the sword."

From nearly twenty pages of Meditations upon Death, after the notes of non-addresses, and his Majesty's closer confinement in Carisbroke castle, we select a few sentences. We would like to transcribe the whole section, but it is too long. It is full of dignity and nobleness, realizing the fine lines of Marvell, quoted in a back number:

"As I have leisure enough, so I have cause more than enough to meditate upon, and prepare for my death; for I know there are but few steps between the prisons

and graves of princes. It is God's indulgence which gives me the space, but man's cruelty that gives me the sad occasion for these thoughts. For, besides the common burthen of mortality which lies upon me as a man, I now bear the heavy load of other men's ambitious fears, jealousies, and cruel passions, whose envy or enmity against me makes their own lives seem deadly to them, while I enjoy every part of mine. I thank God my prosperity made me not wholly a stranger to the contemplation of mortality. Those are now unseasonable, since this is always uncertain: death being an eclipse, which oft happeneth as well in clear as cloudy days. Indeed, I did never find so much the life of religion, the feast of a good conscience, and the brazen wall of a judicious integrity and constancy, as since I came to these closer conflicts with the thoughts of death. They have left me but little of life, and only the husk and shell, as it were, which their further malice and cruelty can take from me. The assaults of affliction may be terrible, like Samson's lion, but they yield much sweetness to those that dare encounter and overcome them; who know how to overlive the witherings of their own gourds without discontent or peevishness, while they may get converse with God. I confess it is not easy for me to contend

with those many horrors of death, wherewith God suffers me to be tempted; which are equally horrid, either in the suddenness of a barbarous assassination, or in those greater formalities whereby my enemies (being more solemnly cruel) will, it may be, seek to add (as those did who crucified Christ) the mockery of justice to the cruelty of malice; that I may be destroyed, as with greater pomp and

artifice, so with less pity, it will be but a necessary policy to make my death appear as an act of justice, done by subjects upon their sovereign; who knows that no law of God or man invests them with any power of judicature without me, much less against me: and who, being sworn and bound by all that is sacred before God and man, to endeavor my preservation, must pretend justice to cover their perjury. At present, the will of my enemies seems to be their only rule, their power the measure, and their success the exactor of what they are pleased to call justice; while they flatter themselves with the fancy of their own safety by my danger, and the security of their lives and designs by my death; forgetting that as the greatest temptations to sin are wrapped up in seeming prosperities, so the severest vengeances of God are then most accomplished, when men are suffered to complete their wicked purposes."

The larger half of the Eikon is well worthy of perusal, as a mere study of style; it has a higher value as a historical record, and it is most of all valuable for the personal character impressed upon it. With Charles I. we stop for the present; and in our next paper, a corollary to this, as it were, rank and title, in general, with authorwe shall aim to depict the union of ship and literature. From Royal we shall descend to Noble authors; and, coming down at last to commoners of genius, finally reach the reign of pure Democracy, the only atmosphere in which the plant of genius may expand and grow.

THE Egyptians embalmed their dead in myrrh and spices, but the blessed art of printing has given us a surer and less revolting method of preserving and transmitting to posterity, all that is truly valuable in the plaudits of virtue, worth, and honor. Books thus become a more permanent memorial than marble, and by their diffusion scatter those lessons among all mankind, which the age of mounds and hieroglyphics, stone and papyrus, had confined to the tablet of a shaft, or the dark recesses of a tomb or a pyramid. It is never to be forgotten, that in the development of this new phasis in the history of the human race, it was printing that first lit the lamp of truth, and has driven on the experiment, till the boundaries of letters have wellnigh become co-extensive with the world. If we do not widely err, there is no part of the globe, where books of all descriptions have become so cheap and abundant as they are at this time in the United States, and, laying aside all other considerations, we may find a proof of the position stated in the fact, that our vernacular literature is no longer confined to the production of school books, the annals of law and divinity, the age of muddy pamphlets, or the motley pages of the newspaper. We have no design to follow up these suggestions by showing how far the study of the natural sciences, the discussion of political economy, or the advances of belles-lettres, have operated to produce this result; far less to identify those causes, in the progress of western arts and commerce, which have concurred to bring down the price of books, and scatter the blessings of an untrammelled press, among all classes. It is sufficient for our purpose to say that even the lives of our distinguished

native chieftains have come in for a share of modern notice, and, we feel proud to add, of a notice which, so far as it reaches, is worthy of the subject. And should our contributions on this head, for the last few years, be equally well followed up for a few years to come, even the desponding strains of one of their own impersonated heroes can no longer be repeated with perfect truth:

"They sink, they pass, they fly, they go, Like a vapor at morning's dawn. Or a flash of light, whose sudden glow Is seen, admired, and gone. "They died; but if a brave man bleeds, And fills the dreamless grave, Shall none repeat his name, his deeds,

Nor tell that he was brave?"

To no one in our literary annals is the public so much indebted for rescuing from oblivion the traits and character of the four celebrated chiefs whose names stand at the head of this article, as to the able author of these biogra phies, William L. Stone. Gifted with a keen perception of the questions of right and wrong, which turn upon the. planting of the colonies among barbarians, who more than idled away their days upon a soil which they did not cultivate-with a deep sympathy in their fate and fortunes, on the one hand, and the paramount claims of letters and Christianity on the other, he has set himself to the task of rendering justice to whom justice belongs, with the ardor of a philanthropist, and the research of a historian. pears to have planned a series of biographies which, if completed, will give a connected view of the leading tribes who occupied New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, with a range in the examination of contem

He ap

porary men and collateral topics, which embraces a wide circle. And he has filled up the outlines of his plan, thus far, in a manner which leaves but little to glean in the path which he has trod. If the extension of this circle, and the large amount of contemporaneous matter brought in, has, in the minds of some, abstracted too large a share of attention, and left the biographies with less unity and compactness than they would otherwise have assumed, this is exclusively the fault of their plan, so far as it is acknowledged, and not of the execution. And for this course of extension there is a plea to be found in the nature of the subject, in the treatment of which, scantiness of material was often sought to be supplied by the introduction of collateral and sometimes extraneous matter. We propose briefly to notice the series of these biographies in their order of publication. In his first work on Brant, he has presented, in living colors, the great Mohawk of 1776, who rose up to crush that confederacy which Washington and his compeers had pledged their lives to maintain. Brant was a man of power and capacities, mental and physical, beyond his tribe; and was so situated, in the actual contest, as to throw a greater weight into the scale against us, than any other, or all of the hostile chiefs of the Red Race put together. If he could not, like Ariel, call up the "spirits of the vasty deep," he could, at his bidding, summon together the no less malignant spirits of the woods, who fell upon our sleeping hamlets with the fury of demons. And whether at Johnson Hall or Niagara, at Cherry Valley or Schoharie, on the waters of the Oriskany or the Chemung, he was the ruling and informing spirit of the contest. Such was the power he wielded as commander of a most effective body of light troops (for such are all Indian warriors), who were supported by large and well-appointed armies, that, like the electric flashes of the boding storm, he preceded the heavier outbreak by sounding aloud the wild notes of terror and dismay. It was in this manner that his name became a talisman on the frontiers, to conjure up deeds of evil, and in this way also, doubtless, it became loaded with reproaches, some of which, as the author has denoted, were due to other actors in the contest. It is difficult, however,

to disturb the judgments of a preceding age, on the character of individuals who have long passed off the stage of action, whether those judgments be favorable or unfavorable; and it is, in fact, impossible to reverse them. It is only necessary to glance backward a short way, on the track of biography, to perceive that posterity never revises the opinions once put on individual character, heroic or literary. It tries to forget all it can, and everybody it can, and never remembers a long time any name which it is possible to forget. It is willing, we should infer, to concede something to the great men among barbarian nations, whose names have often burst upon civilized society with the fearful attractions of the meteor, or the comet, producing admiration in the beholders, without stopping to inquire the true cause. Such were the Tamerlanes and the Tippoo Saibs of the eastern world, of a prior age, as well as the Mehemet Alis and Abdel Kaders of the present. And such were, also, with reduced means of action, numbers of the American aboriginal chiefs, who, between the days of Manco Capac and Micanopy have figured in the history of the western world. Most of these men owe their celebrity to the mere fact of their having dazzled or astounded, or like Brant himself, excited the terror of those who opposed them. In the case of the latter, a change of opinion in those particular traits which affect his humanity, is less readily made, from the fact, yet generally remembered, that he had received a Christian education; that he was, while a mere boy, received into the best society, acquired the English language, and had been instructed, first at a New England academy, and afterwards at one of its most practically efficient colleges. Posterity holds the Mohawk chief responsible to have carried the precepts thus obtained into the forest, and to have diffused their blessings among those who had perhaps his bravery, without his talents or his knowledge. Those who fought against him were ill qualified, we confess, to be his judges. He had not only espoused the wrong cause, wrong because it was adverse to the progress of national freedom and those very principles his people contended for; but he battled for it with a master's hand, and made the force of his energy felt,

as the author has more fully indicated than was before known, from the banks of the Mohawk and the Niagara, to the Ohio, the Miami, and the Wabash. Yet, if there was error in the extent to which he carried the precepts of civilisation and Christianity, it was meet it should be pointed out, although it will also be admitted, the public have a right to look for the strongest of these proofs of a kind and benevolent feeling towards his open enemies, out of the range of his domestic circle. His family had carried the incipient principles of civilisation, which he gave them, too high-they had exhibited to the next age, a too prominent example of cultivation and refinement in every sense-not to feel deeply the obloquy cast upon his name, by the poetic spirit of the times; and not to wish that one who had, in verity, so many high and noble qualities, both in the council and the field, should also be without a spot on his humanity. We deem the feeling as honorable to all who have the blood of the chieftain in their veins as it is praiseworthy in his biographer. We cannot, however, consent to forget, that historical truth is very severe in its requisitions, and is not to be put off, by friend or foe, with hearsay testimony, or plausible surmises.

Brant cannot, like Xicotencal, be accused of having joined the invaders of his country, who were recklessly resolved upon its subjugation; but he overlooked the fact, that both the invader and the invaded, in the long and bloody border warfare of the revolution, were, in all that constitutes character, the same people. They were of the same blood and lineage, spoke the same language, had the same laws and customs, and the same literature and religion, and he failed to see that the only real point of difference between them was, who should wield the sceptre. Whichever party gained the day in such a contest, letters and Christianity must triumph, and as the inevitable result, barbarism must decline, and the power of the Indian nation fall.

In Brant, barbarism and civilisation evinced a strong and singular contest. He was at one moment a savage, and at another a civilian, at one moment cruel, and at another humane; and he exhibited, throughout all the heroic period of his career, a constant vacillation and struggle between good and bad, noble and ignoble feelings, and, as

one or the other got the mastery, he was an angel of mercy, or a demon of destruction. In this respect, his character does not essentially vary from that which has been found to mark the other leading red men who, from Philip to Osceola, have appeared on the stage of action. Like them, his reasoning faculties were far less developed than his physical perceptions. And to attempt to follow or find anything like a fixed principle of humanity, basing itself on the higher obligations that sway the human breast, would, we fear, become a search after that which had no existence in his mind; or if the germ was there, it was too feeble to become predominant. We do not think it necessary, in commenting on his life, to enter into any nice train of reasoning or motives to account for this characteristic, or to reconcile cruelties of the most shocking kind, when contrasted with traits of mildness and urbanity. They were different moods of the man, and, in running back over the eventful years of his life, it becomes clear, that civilisation had never so completely gained the mastery over his mind and heart, as not to desert him, without notice, the moment he heard the sound of the war-whoop. The fact that he could use the pen, supplied no insuperable motives against his wielding the war club. His tomahawk and his Testament lay on the same shelf. The worst trait in his character is revealed in his tardiness to execute acts of purposed mercy. There was too often some impediment, which served as an excuse, as when he had a ploughed field to cross to save Wells and his family, or a lame heel, or gave up the design altogether, as in the case of Wisner, whom he construed it into an act of mercy to tomahawk.

That he was, however, a man of an extraordinary firmness, courage and decision of character, is without doubt. But his fate and fortunes have not been such as to give much encouragement to chiefs of the native race in lending their influence to European, or Anglo-European powers, who may be engaged in hostilities against each other on this continent. Pontiac had realized this before him, and Tecumtha realized it after him. Neither attained the object he sought. One of these chiefs was assassinated, the other fell in battle, and Brant himself only survived the defeat of his cause, to fret out his