THE RERELLION RECORD: Edited by Frank Moore. Published by G. P. Putnam, New York. Part 17 contains Portraits of Secretary Chase and Col. Corcoran. LYRICS FOR FReedom, and otHER POEMS. Under the auspices of the Continental Club. New York: G. C. Carleton. OUR FLAG. A Poem by T. H. Underwood. . New York: G. C. Carleton. HORSE RAILROAD Guide for BOSTON AND VICINITY. Boston: B. B. Russell. Price, 3 cents. [Here is a minute account of these Roads connecting Boston with the neighboring towns.] PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. ASTREA AT THE CAPITOL. ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862. BY J. G. WHITTIER. WHEN first I saw our banner wave In the foul market-place I stood, And saw the Christian mother sold, And childhood with its locks of gold, Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood. I shut my eyes, I held my breath, And smothering down the wrath and shame That set my Northern blood aflame, Stood silent-where to speak was death. Beside me gloomed the prison-cell Where wasted one in slow decline The flag that floated from the dome For crime was virtue: Gown and Sword On the oppressor's side was power; And yet I knew that every wrong, I knew that truth would crush the lie,- A free flag floats from yonder dome, Not as we hoped, in calm of prayer, 'Midst sounds that madden and appall, The song that Bethlehem's shepherds knew!The harp of David melting through The demon-agonies of Saul! Not as we hoped ;-but what are we? Above our broken dreams and plans God lays, with wiser hand than man's, The corner-stones of liberty. I cavil not with him: the voice From The Edinburgh Review. Memoirs of Richard the Third and some of un "And when he would have said King Richard died, And called a horse, a horse, he Burbage cried;" and this is unluckily one of the rare instances in which, if it be not profanation to say so, the truth and modesty of nature have been overstepped by our immortal bard to pro duce a character of calculated and unmitihero, after expatiating on his deformities, gated atrocity. In the very first scene, the rent of obloquy.* Why is this? Why do we thus cling to a judgment which, we are assured, has been ill-considered, to the extent of uniformly opposing a deaf ear to motions for a new trial? Is it because the nuIT was the shrewd remark of Johnson, merical majority of the English public are that when the world think long about a matin the same predicament as the great Duke ter, they generally think right; and this may of Marlborough, who boldly avowed Shakbe one reason why attempts to whitewash speare to be the only History of England the received villains or tyrants of history he ever read? because the ground once ochave been commonly attended with indiffer-cupied by creative genius is thenceforth ent success. The ugly features of Robes- approachable by realities and unassailable pierre's character look positively more reby proofs? The image of the dramatic pulsive through the varnish of sophistry Richard, as represented by a succession of which M. Louis Blanc has spread over them. great actors, is vividly called up whenever the name is mentionedThe new light thrown by Mr. Carlyle on the domestic and political career of Frederic William of Prussia, the collector of giants, simply exhibits him as the closest approximation to a downright brute and madman that was ever long tolerated as the ruler of a civilized community. Despite of Mr. Froude's indefatigable research, skilful arrangement of materials, and attractive style, Henry the Eighth is still the royal Bluebeard, who spared neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust; and hardly any perceptible change has been effected in the popular impression of Richard the Third, although since 1621 (the date of Buck's History), it has continued an open question whether he was really guilty of more than a small fraction of the crimes imputed to him. misshapen persons are commonly out of humor with the world, but it may be doubted Walpole's "Historic Doubts" is amongst whether the best of his writings. If he was advoone in actual life ever indulged any in this sort of self-communing at the outset cating a paradox, he believed it to be a The far truer picture of a man truth; and in the subsequent encounter with of a career. Hume, he has the advantage which thorough hurried from crime to crime by ambition is acquaintance with the subject must almost Macbeth; and the most virulent assailants always give over the ablest antagonist, whose of Richard's memory are agreed in allowing him the kind of merit which Fielding gives original views were based upon superficial knowledge. Yet no part of this remarkable to Jonathan Wild, who, finding, after due essay is freshly remembered, except an in- deliberation, that he could gain nothing by cidental reference (on which the ingenious refraining from a good action, did one. By author laid little stress) to the apocryphal presupposing the worst, such a commencetestimony of the Countess of Desmond, who ment checks artistic development whilst it had danced with Richard in her youth, and violates the truth of history; and not the declared him to be the handsomest man at least interesting or instructive result, anticicourt except his brother Edward, confessedly pated from an impartial examination of the the handsomest man of his day. Mr. Sharon authorities, will be the insight we shall atTurner's learned and conscientious recapitu- tain by means of them into the heaven-born lation of the good measures, enlightened See the "History of England during the views, and kindly actions of Richard has Middle Ages," vol. iv. book v. chapter i. All the best materials and weightiest authorities for the proved equally inoperative to stem the cur-defence of Richard are collected in this chapter. concludes "And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover Moralists have laid down that dwarfs and poet's mode of selecting and working up the wholesale beheading, hanging, and quartermaterials of his play. Mr. Jesse frankly owns that his work has been composed without any definite object, moral, critical, antiquarian, or philosophical. It "emanated indirectly in the drama," entitled "The Last War of the Roses," which occupies more than a fourth of the volume, and strikes us to be an attempt, more ambitious than successful, to rival the greatest of dramatists on his own ground. "To the merit of novelty," says the author in his preface, "whether of facts or arguments, he can prefer but a very trifling claim. To compress scattered and curious information, and, if possible, to amuse, have been the primary objects of the author." The result is a very agreeable addition to popular literature, containing a good deal that will be new as well as interesting to the class of readers for whose amusement he is in the habit of catering. But if the life of Richard was to be rewritten at all, the task should have been undertaken in a more serious and meditative mood, with a full sense of its responsibilities, and a keener insight into the complex causes of the strange notions of right and wrong, legality and illegality, which marked the period in dispute. During the whole of the Plantagenet dynasty, the succession to the crown was involved in the most mischievous uncertainty. Except in the case of an adult eldest son, inheriting from the father, there was no rule of descent universally recognized. Whether more remote lineals should be preferred to collaterals, or whether claims by or through females were admissible at all, were questions frequently and most furiously agitated; nor was any title deemed absolutely unimpeachable until ratified by the popular voice or, what was equally more potent, by the assent of the landed aristocracy. It is not going too far to say that any member of the royal family, or even any peer related to it by blood, had a chance of the throne: hence the plentiful crop of conspiracies constantly springing up: hence, also, the eagerness of the sovereign, de facto, to get rid, by any means, foul or fair, of every possible competitor. To bear no brother near the throne was not, in the fifteenth century, peculiar to the Turk; and servile parliaments were never wanting to pronounce or ratify the cruel sentences of fear, expediency, or hate. The ing, that took place after each alternation of fortune during the Yorkist and Lancastrian battles, were only exceeded in atrocity by the vindictive and insulting butcheries of prisoners perpetrated on the field. It has been computed that not fewer than eighty princes of the blood died deaths of violence during these wars; and the ancient nobility would have been wellnigh extinguished altogether, had the struggle been prolonged. Edward IV.'s first Parliament included in one Act of Attainder, Henry VI., Queen Margaret, their son Edward, the Dukes of Somerset and Exeter, the Earls of Northumberland, Devon, Wiltshire, and Pembroke, Viscount Beaumont, Lords Ross, Neville, Rougemont, Dacre, and Hungerfield, with one hundred and thirty-eight knights, priests, and esquires, who were one and all adjudged to suffer all the penalties of treason. The prevalent doctrine of these times as to religious and moral obligations is comprised in these lines : "York. I took an oath he should quietly Before a true and lawful magistrate Subjects had no more respect for oaths than princes; and what we now understand by loyalty was almost unknown. We are indebted to Lord Macaulay's penetration and sagacity for the discovery that the Scottish clans, which so long upheld the cause of the Stuarts, were animated far more by local sympathies and antipathies, especially by hatred of the Campbells, than by chivalrous devotion to a fallen dynasty. The Yorkists and Lancastrians were influenced by an analogous class of motives, or by purely selfish views. Most of the greater barons chose their side from hopes of personal aggrandizement, or from private pique. The most notorious example was Warwick, the Kingmaker, who feasted daily thirty thousand persons in his castle halls, who could rally thirty thousand men under his banner, and carry them, like a troop of household servants, from camp to camp, as passion, interest, or caprice dictated. It is a remarkable * fact that, in 1469, each of the rival kings was under durance at once,-Edward IV. at Middleham, and Henry IV. in the Tower, whilst the Nevilles were wavering between the two. It has been taken for granted that the people, as contradistinguished from the barons, were Yorkists, who were undoubtedly popular in the city of London, where Edward IV. won all hearts by his courtesy and hospitality. Neither in city nor country, however, do we find any national or public-spirited preference for either dynasty. When the commoners rose, they rose from a sense of personal oppression, or, like the followers of Robin of Redesdale, in order to redress some local grievance. posed in him. He had the same motive as the weak, wavering Clarence for joining Warwick, when the King-maker broke with Edward and sent the haughty message :— "Tell him from me that he has done me wrong, And for it I'll uncrown him ere 't be long." What the precise wrong was, is still a mystery. The repudiation of the contract with the Lady Bona, sister of Louis of France, is doubted by Hume, and rejected by Lingard, as the cause of quarrel; whilst the author of "The Last of the Barons" gives plausible reasons for the conjecture on which the plot of that romance mainly turns — that Warwick took just offence at an insult ofThere is not a more striking illustration fered by the amorous monarch to one of his of the gross ignorance and superstition of daughters. The hand of the eldest, the Lady the age than the general belief that the mists Isabella, was the bait with which the Kingwhich disordered the tactics of Warwick's maker lured Clarence; and Richard had army at Barnet were raised for the been from early youth attached to the youngby Friar Bungay. It was, in fact, the age est (whom Shakspeare calls the eldest) Lady of all others in which unscrupulous ambition Anne; a circumstance which may partly acmight hope to thrive; in which everything was possible for courage, military skill, statecraft, and dogged determination, backed by birth and fortune. If Richard has attained a bad pre-eminence for treachery and bloodthirstiness, it must be owned that he succumbed to temptations from which few of his family or generation would have turned away. purpose Although Shakspeare assigns him a prominent part in the battle of Wakefield, where his father, the Duke of York, was taken and put to death after exclaiming, ་་ ་ count for his rapid success in the famous courtship scene; the forced and overcharged character of which is so glossed over and concealed by the consummate art of the execution, that we are puzzled in what sense to receive the exulting exclamation: "Was ever woman in such humor wooed? Was ever woman in such humor won?" Shakspeare makes Richard remain true to Edward from calculation; his chances of the crown being materially increased by the defection of Clarence. But a man may not be the less honest, because honesty is his "Three times did Richard make a lane to me, best policy; and it is enough that in every And thrice cried, Courage, father, fight it out; "emergency he gave Edward the wisest and Richard (born Oct. 2, 1452) was only in his apparently most disinterested counsel, as ninth year when the battle was fought, and well as the support of his tried courage and he narrowly escaped the fate of Rutland. military skill. He commanded the right The Duchess of York took refuge with her wing of the Yorkist army at Barnet, and younger children in the Low Countries, and was directly opposed to Warwick, the most remained there, till the triumphant entry of renowned warrior of the period. Personal Edward the Fourth into London and the prowess was then essential in a leader, and decisive victory of Towton restored them to Gloucester and Warwick are reported to their country and to more than the full im- have fought hand to hand in the mêlée. Acmunities of their rank. The title of Duke cording to the tradition, the King-maker of Gloucester, with an ample appanage in evaded the conflict as long as he could, and the shape of lordships and manors, was at then felled Richard unwounded to the ground. once conferred on Richard, who, at an unu-At Tewkesbury he commanded the van, and sually early age, was also appointed to three or four offices of the highest trust and dignity. He amply justified the confidence re* Lingard, vol. iv. p. 168. was confronted with the Duke of Somerset, who had taken up so formidable a position, fenced by dykes and hedges, that to carry it seemed hopeless. After a feigned attack |