laws of the State, a work which engaged his at- | tention until his appointment by President Adams, in 1827, as Chargé d'Affaires to Denmark. He resided at Copenhagen until 1835, when he was appointed Minister Resident to the court of Prussia by President Jackson. In 1837 he was made Minister Plenipotentiary to the same court by President Van Buren. He retained this position until 1846, when he was recalled by President Polk.

Mr. Wheaton had, previously to his departure for Europe, delivered an Address before the New York Historical Society in 1820, and in 1824 at the opening of the New York Athenæum, an institution afterwards merged into the Society Library. He also contributed to the North American Review, and in 1826 published the Life of William Pinkney, with whom he had become personally acquainted during his residence at Washington. He afterwards prepared an abridgment | of the work for Sparks's American Biography. He also translated the Code Napoleon, the manuscript of which was unfortunately consumed by fire soon after its completion.

This valuable literary career, side by side with laborious professional and public services, was continued with still greater efficiency in Europe. In 1831 he published in London The History of the Northmen, a work of great research, and one of the first on its subject in the language. It was translated into French in 1842, and its author was engaged in preparing a new American edition at the time of his death. In 1836 his Elements of International Law appeared in England and the United States. It was republished in 1846 with additions. In 1841 he wrote a work in French, Histoire du Droit des Gens depuis la Paix de Westphalie, which was complimented by the French Institute, republished at Leipsic in 1844, and translated in New York, with the title of History of the Law of Nations. It is regarded as a standard authority, and has received the highest commendations throughout Europe. In 1842 he published in Philadelphia, An Enquiry into the British Claim of a Right of Search of American Vessels.

In 1843 Mr. Wheaton was made corresponding member of the Section of Moral and Political Sciences of the French Institute, and in 1844 of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He took great interest in these associations, and enjoyed the intimacy of their most eminent members.

In 1844 he signed a convention with Baron Bulow, the Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, regulating the commercial intercourse between the United States and the Zollverein, on which he had labored for several years. It was, greatly to his regret, rejected by the Senate.

The long residence of Mr. Wheaton at one of the leading courts of Europe, combined with his extensive studies in international law, caused him to be frequently consulted by the representatives of his country in other parts of Europe, and he thus rendered eminent public services beyond the range of his own mission. He was universally regarded as the head of our foreign diplomacy, and his recall was lamented by considerate men of all parties as a national misfortune.

After a few months' residence in Paris, he returned in May, 1847, to New York, where a

public dinner was given him soon after his arrival. A similar honor was tendered him in Philadelphia, but declined. His native city had his portrait painted by Healy, and placed in her council hall. He delivered an address in September of the same year before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Brown University, on the Progress and Prospects of Germany. He was about to commence his duties as Professor of International Law at Harvard University, to which he had been elected soon after his return, when he was attacked by a disease which closed his life, on the eleventh of March, 1848.

In

ROBERT, the second son of the Hon. Henry Wheaton, was born in New York, October 5, 1826. His childhood was passed in Copenhagen, whither his father removed as Chargé d'Affaires of the United States shortly after his birth. 1836 the family removed to Berlin, and in 1838, Robert, after a careful course of preliminary mental training by his father, was placed at school at Paris. In 1840 he lost his only brother Edward, a bereavement which afflicted him deeply. In 1841 he left school, and devoted two years to the study of engineering with a private tutor. Owing, however, to apprehensions that his health was too delicate for the out-door exposure incident to the practical duties of the profession, he abandoned it in 1843, and entered the school of MM. Barbé and Masson at Paris. After a year spent in classical studies he attended lectures at the Sorbonne and the College de France. He was at the same time cultivating his fine musical taste, and became a proficient in the science. His summers were passed in visits to his family at Berlin, and to friends in a few other cities of central Europe. In April, 1847, after his father's recal, he returned with him to the United States, and in the following September entered the Cambridge law school. On the completion of his course in 1850, he became a student in the office of Messrs. Dana and Parker of Boston, and in July, 1851, was admitted to practice. In the September following, while on his way to visit his family at Providence, he took cold, owing to exposure in consequence of the cars running off the track. His illness rapidly increased, and on the ninth of October, 1851, he breathed his last.

A volume of Selections from the Writings of Robert Wheaton appeared in 1854. It contains a sympathetic memoir of his brief but interesting life, with extracts from his journals and correspondence, and articles on the Sources of the Divina Commedia, Jasmin, Coquerel's Experimental Christianity, the Revolutions in Prussia and Sicily, and on a few other subjects, from the North American Review, and other periodicals, all ably and thoughtfully written.

CHARLES J. INGERSOLL.

CHARLES J. INGERSOLL was born at Philadelphia on the third of October, 1782. His father, Jared Ingersoll, though belonging to a family who for the most part adhered to the Royalists in the Revolutionary contest (his father, Jared Ingersoll, of Connecticut, being Stampmaster-General under the Act of Parliament which provoked the American Revolution), was an active advocate of the

popular side, and a member of the Convention which formed the Federal Constitution. He early settled in Philadelphia.

Mr. Ingersoll received a liberal education, and on its conclusion visited Europe, where he travelled in company with Mr. King, the American minister to London.

In 1801, a tragedy from his pen, Edwy and Elgiva, was produced at the Philadelphia theatre, and published.

In 1808 he wrote a pamphlet on the Rights and Wrongs, Power and Policy of the United States of America, in defence of the commercial measures of Jefferson's administration.

In 1809 he published anonymously a work which created a sensation, Inchiquin's Letters.* The "Letters" are introduced by the ancient mystification of the purchase, at a bookseller's stall in Antwerp, of a broken packet of letters from America, which turn out to be sent from Washington by Inchiquin, a Jesuit, to his friends in Europe, who, in one or two introductory epistles, express the greatest anxiety touching his mission to a land of savages, with considerable curiosity respecting the natives. A burlesque letter from Caravan, a Greek at Washington, gives a ludicrous account of the perils of the capital, and the foreign minister hunting in its woods. Inchiquin describes the houses of Congress and their oratory; runs over the characters of the Presidents, from Washington to Madison; the literature of Barlow's Columbiad and Marshall's Washington; the stock and population of the country; its education, amusements, resources, and prospects. The Columbiad is shrewdly criticised. One remark will show the pretensions, at that time, of the author. "Critically speaking, Homer, Virgil, and Milton occupy exclusively the illustrious (epic) quarter of Parnassus, and time alone can determine whether Barlow shall be seated with them. The 'dearth

of invention,''faintness of the characters,' 'lack of pathos,' and other constitutional defects,' are set off against the learned, benevolent, elegant style of the performance." The Abbé Raynal is quoted for a maximum calculation of the prospective population of America at ten millions. Among other patriotic hits there is a humorous account of the foreign prejudiced or disappointed travellers who, in those days, gave the world its impressions of America.

In 1812 Ingersoll was elected a member of the House of Representatives. He took his seat at the special session called in May, 1813, to provide for the conduct of the war. He was one of the youngest members of that body, and more youthful in appearance even than in years, so that at his first entrance the doorkeeper refused him admittance. He was an earnest advocate of every measure brought forward for the vigorous prosecution of the war. In 1814, in an elaborate speech, he proclaimed and enforced the American version of the law of nations, that

Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, during a late residence in the United States of America: being a fragment of a Private Correspondence, accidentally discovered in Europe; containing a favorable view of the Manners, Literature, and State of Society of the United States, and a refutation of many of the aspersions cast upon this country by former residents and tourists. By some unknown foreigner. New York: J. Riley.

On

"free ships make free goods," a doctrine which, now generally recognised as a great peace measure, had at that time few advocates. the expiration of his term of service the same year he was not re-elected, but was soon after appointed by Madison District Attorney of the State of Pennsylvania, an office which he held for fourteen years, until his removal by General Jackson at the commencement of his first Presidential term. During his second term, his administration had the warm support of Mr. Ingersoll. In 1826, at a convention of the advocates of the internal improvements of his state, Ingersoll presented a resolution in favor of the introduction of railroads worked by steam-power, similar to those which had just made their appearance in England. The plan was rejected by a large majority. As a member of the Legislature, a few years after, in 1829-30, one of the first railroad bills in the United States was enacted on his motion and report.

In 1837, by a report on currency, presented to the convention for reforming the Constitution of Pennsylvania, he anticipated by some months President Van Buren's recommendation to Congress of the Independent Treasury. He was an active member of the House of Representatives from 1839 to 1849.

Ingersoll

In 1845 he published the first volume of his Historical Sketch of the Second War between the United States of America and Great Britain, embracing the events of 1812-13, completing the work in three volumes. A second series, of the events of 1814-1815, appeared in 1852. The style of his history is irregular and discursive, but vivid and energetic. Its general character is that of a book of memoirs, strongly influenced by the democratic partisan views of the narrator. It contains numerous details of the principles and measures of public policy in which he was an eminent participant, with many matters of a more strictly personal character, especially in his account of the Bonaparte family, of whom, from his long friendship with Joseph Bonaparte, he had

original sources of information. Some three hundred pages of the "History" are thus occupied with the fortunes of the Napoleon dynasty. One of the most noteworthy of the American topics discussed is the defence of the system of privateering which has been since substantially set forth by President Pierce, in his Message of 1854. There are also, among other personal anecdotes, some animated descriptions of Washington and of Jefferson.

Mr. Ingersoll is at present engaged on a History of the Territorial Acquisitions of the United States.

Joseph Reed Ingersoll, the brother of Charles J. Ingersoll, a distinguished lawyer, for many years a prominent Whig in the House of Representatives, is the author of a translation of Roccus's treatise De Navibus et Nauto, of an address delivered in 1837 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Bowdoin College on The Advantages of Science and Literature, which attracted much attention, and of several other discourses of a similar character.

Edward, a third brother of the same family, wrote poems on the times entitled Horace in Philadelphia, which appeared in the Port Folio, and was a writer on political subjects in Walsh's Gazette.

BOOK-MAKING TRAVELLERS IN AMERICA-FROM THE INCHIQUIN LETTERS.

The labors of this class of writing travellers in America have been seconded by those of another, who, as their writings are confined to bills of exchange and accounts current, have contented themselves with being oral haberdashers of small stories, and retailers of ribaldry. Swarms of noxious insects swept from the factories and spunging-houses of Europe, after enjoying a full harvest of emolument and importance in the cities of this country, return to their original insignificance at home, to buzz assertions through their "little platoons of society," and then come back again to bask in the sunshine they feign to slight. Apprentices and understrappers, mongrel abbés and gens d'industrie, in the course of their flight over the Atlantic, are transmuted into fine gentlemen and virtuosi, shocked at the barbarian customs of this savage republic; the hospitality of whose citizens they condescend to accept, while they commiserate and calumniate their hosts, and consider it their especial errand and office to vilify, disturb, and overturn the government. The time was when these sturdy beggars walked without knocking into every door, taking the chief seats in the synagogue, and the uppermost rooms at feasts, devouring widows' houses, reviling with impunity the food they fed on. But so many ludicrous and so many serious explosions have gone off of these transatlantic bubbles, so many individuals have been put to shame, so many respectable families to ruin, by their polluting contact, that the delusion is broke, and they begin to be seen in their essential hideousness. Persons of condition from abroad have so often proved to be hostlers and footmen, and men of learning mountebank doctors, that the Americans find it necessary to shake these foreign vermin from their skirts, and to assert a dignity and self-respect, which are the first steps to that consideration from others, hitherto by this excrescent usurpation repelled from their society. Hic nigræ succus loliginis, hæc est

Erugo mera

was my fortune to be assorted at every meal with half a dozen agents from the manufacturing towns of England, some Frenchmen exiled from St. Domingo, a Dutch supercargo, a Chinese mandarin-as a caitiff from Canton entitled himself-the young Greek, a copy of one of whose letters I sent you some time ago, and a countryman of mine; all of whom, after a plentiful regale, and drinking each other's healths till their brains were addled with strong liquors, would almost every day chime into a general execration of the fare, climate, customs, people, and institutions of this nether region. One of the Englishmen, a native of Cornwall, who was never out of a mist in his life till he left the parish of his birth, complained of the variableness of the weather, another of the beef, and a third of the porter, alleviations, without which they pronounced existence insupportable, taking care to accompany their complaints with magnificent eulogiums on the clear sky, cheap living, and other equally unquestionable advantages of their own country, with occasional intimations thrown in of their personal importance at home. The Creole French, in a bastard dialect, declaimed at the dishonesty and fickleness of the Americans, the demureness of their manners, and provoking irregularity of the language; winding up their philippie with a rapturous recollection of the charms of Paris; where in all probability no one of them ever was, except to obtain passports for leaving the kingdom.

They talk of beauties that they never saw,
And fancy raptures that they never knew.

The Chinese, who never was free from a sweat till
he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and who, when
in Canton, never forgot in his prayers to implore the
blessings of a famine or pestilence, catching the con-
tagion of the company, and mechanically imitative,
though he could not speak so as to be understood,
endeavored, by signs and shrugs, to show that he
suffered from the heat, and gave us to understand
that an annual plague must be inevitable in such a
climate. The Irishman, who swallowed two bottles
of claret with a meal, besides brandy and malt
liquors, swore the intemperate weather gave him
fevers. The Hollander smoked his phlegmatic pipe
in silence, looking approbation; and the complying
Greek nodded assent, while at table, to every syl-
lable that was uttered, though he afterwards coin-
cided with me in a contradiction of the whole.
When I was formerly in America, I knew several
foreigners, then well stricken in years, who had
resided here since the peace of 1783, always grum-
bling over the privations of this country, and sigh-
ing as usual; but fat and satisfied, and indulging not
the least expectation of ever exchanging their for-
lorn state here for their brilliant prospects else-
where. Like a well-fed curate, they dwell for ever
on the fascinations of futurity, as contrasted with
the wretchedness of mortality, recommending all
good men to hasten from the one to the other, but
without any
wish for themselves to leave this world

of tribulation.

of Daniel Webster. At the age of seventeen, after having received an ordinary English education in his native place, he crossed the Alleghanies on foot and settled in Marietta, Ohio. In 1807 he was elected a member of the state legislature, where he introduced a bill which led to the arrest of Colonel Burr and the defeat of his plans. He was appointed about the same time Marshal of the State by Jefferson, an office which he resigned in 1811 to take part as a volunteer to repel the attacks of the Indians on the northern frontier. In 1812 he entered the United States army. He served with distinction at Detroit, and afterwards at the Battle of the Thames, and was appointed Governor of the territory of Michigan in 1813 by Madison, a position which he held until his appointment as Secretary of War by General Jackson in 1831. In this period, in 1819 and 1820, he projected and was engaged in carrying into effect a scientific exploration of the upper region of the Mississippi, which has identified his name permanently with the geography of the country. In 1836 he was appointed Minister to France, where he rendered important service in opposing the admission of the right of search in the quintuple treaty for the suppression of the Slave Trade. In consequence of opposition to the treaty made with Great Britain on this subject in 1842, which he regarded as involving his official position, he requested a recall and returned home. He published, in 1840, a volume entitled France, its King, Court, and Government, of historic interest for its sketch of the travels of Louis Philippe in America, which the minister had listened to from the lips of the royal adventurer at the Tuileries. Mr. Cass also contributed to the Southern Literary Messenger several papers on Candia and Cyprus. In 1845 he was elected United States Senator from Michigan, but resigned his seat in May on his nomination as the candidate of the Democratic party for the Presidency. After the election of General Taylor he was in 1849 reelected to the Senate for the unexpired portion of his term, and still remains a member of that body. In 1848 he delivered an address before the New England Society of Michigan at Detroit, which was published at the time. In this eloquent discourse he thus contrasts the past of the old world with the present and future of America.

The hardy emigrant is ascending the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and already the forest is giving way before the axe of the woodsman on the very shores that look out upon China and Japan. In many portions of the old world, and in the oldest too, time has done its work. History has closed its record. Their high places have a world-renown in human annals, but they are solitudes. The pilgrim from other lands may go up to visit them, but it is for what they have been, and not for what they are. It is not to survey a prosperous country and a happy people; but to meditate upon the instability of human power, where the foundations of power were the deepest and the broadest. I have seen the wandering Arab, the descendant of Ishmael, sitting upon the ruins of Baalbeck, himself a ruin, not less marked and melancholy than they. Think you that visions of far away splendor passed before his eyes, and shut out the prospect of that wretchedness, which has bowed down his race for centuries? Think you that such dreams, waking though they may be, can give

green pastures and rich flocks and herds, as in the days of the Patriarch? No, it is better to look round on prosperity than back on glory. The events of ages elsewhere seem here to be compressed within the ordinary life of man. Our birth is of yesterday; our growth of to-day. We have no past. No monuments, that have come down to us, glorious in their ruins, telling the story of former magnificence in the very solitude, that tells the story of present decay. Sometimes the shadows of bygone days pass over me, and I awake as from a dream, asking myself, is this great country, north of the Ohio and west of these broad Lakes, teeming with life, liberty, and prosperity; is this the country I entered half a century ago, shut out from the light of heaven by the primitive forests that covered it? Is this the country, which then contained one territory, and which now contains five States of this Union; whose population then numbered a few thousands, and now ing towns, animated with the busy hum of industry, numbers five millions of people? And these flourishwhere they are, can I have slept under gigantic trees, throwing their broad branches over an unbroken soil? And the railroad, does it follow the war path, where I have followed the Indian? And the church bell, which summons a Christian community to prayer and to praise in the house of God, how brief the interval, since the solitude was broken by the war drum and the war song? We are realizing the fictions of Eastern imagination, and a better genius than him of Aladdin's lamp, the genius of industry and enterprise, is doing that mighty work, whose ultimate issue it is not given to human sagacity to foretell.

Nashville, Tenn. Following the example of his family, both on the father's and mother's side, who had been active in the promotion of western emigration, he soon afterwards removed to Missouri, where, in 1820, he was elected one of her first United States Senators. In the interval of a year between his election and the admission of the state, he devoted himself to the study of the Spanish language, and to a preparation for the vigorous fulfilment of his duties. He took his seat in the Senate August 10, 1821, and retained it, by constant re-election, for the long period of thirty years, during which he took a leading part in the discussion of the great questions which came before that body, and was especially prominent in the debates on the United States Bank and the Sub-Treasury, being a warm friend of the latter measure.

Colonel Benton's moderate course on the slavery question not being approved by the majority of the Senate of his state, and his independent course on various other questions having added to the number of his enemies as well as his friends, he lost his election to the Senate in 1851. He offered himself at the next popular election as a candidate for the House of Representatives, and was successful. In 1854 he was, however, defeated-members of the Democratic party having united with and elected the candidate of the Whigs. In 1853 Colonel Benton published the first volume of his autobiographic work, Thirty Years' View; or a History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850. The thirty years is the period of Mr. Benton's senatorship, extending from the Presidency of Madison to that of Fillmore. The plan of the work, giving to a great mass of material, simplicity and clearness, is simply to treat in chronological order, in one view, the leading epochs of each question, connecting it with some memorable personage or crisis of debate. This is done by a disposition of the matter, in short, well discriminated chapters, easily referred to in a table of contents; devoted mainly to the immediate proceedings of Congress, but relieved by such episodes of a personal character as obituaries, or retirement from office of eminent actors on the scene. Thus there are chapters on the Admission of Missouri, on the Panama Mission, the Retirement of Rufus King, the arrival of La Fayette, the Deaths of Adams and Jefferson. The book is thus a succession of historical tableaux. In one point of view it is highly commendable, for its clear succinct narrative-the ease and bonhommie of the style. It is fluent without being diffuse, and exhibits the result of a long habit of imparting important information in the readiest and most intelligible way.

In addition to the ordinary narrative of events, which might be looked for in a view of the times, the book has two specialities in the reprint of the author's speeches bearing on the subjects, or of such portions of them as he still chooses to adopt, and the use of the unpublished papers of General Jackson which are to be drawn upon.

Mr. Benton's opportunities as an actor and eye-witness, give him great advantages in this species of historical memoir-for such it is, neither exactly history nor biography. In his preface he quotes Macaulay, and justly claims the

prestige of his experience in public affairs for his work. If Gibbon, and Fox, and Mackintosh, wrote better for being Parliament men, Mr. Benton can set forth as well for his story the quorum pars magna fui. "I was," says he, "in the Senate the whole time of which I write-an active, business member, attending and attentive -in the confidence of half the administrations, and a close observer of the others-had an inside view of transactions of which the public saw only the outside, and of many of which the two sides were very different-saw the secret springs and hidden machinery by which men and parties were to be moved, and measures promoted or thwarted --saw patriotism and ambition at their respective labors, and was generally able to discriminate between them."

While the second volume was in progress, early in 1855, Mr. Benton's house at Washington was destroyed by fire, and his library and manuscripts perished in the flames. A letter which he wrote to his publishers will show the prospects of the work, and the prominent characteristics of the man in energy and literary industry.

you

WASHINGTON CITY, March 2, 1855. Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.: Gentlemen: It is not necessary to tell what has happened, cela va sans dire. The point is, the effect and what is to be done. The answer is, first, it will more than double my labor; next, it will delay the second volume say six months, or until the spring of 1856; third, there are some things lost which cannot be replaced, but which were chiefly for a posthumous volume, not coming under our present agreement-most of it composed of correspondence, such as I had deemed worthy, both for the character of the writers and the matter, to go to posterity. For the rest, I go to work immediately (after my return from St. Louis), and work incessantly. Yours truly

Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply embued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans") had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." He touched that age in 1828; and true to all his purposes, he was true to his resolve in this, and executed it with the quietude and indifference of an ordinary transaction. He was in the middle of a third senatorial term, and in the