tablishment received the baggage, and white chambermaids attended me in my apartment. These are the avant couriers of emancipation. Slavery has spread over so large a surface that its weakened ranks cannot shut out competition, and white competition is the grave of slave labor. Whenever and wherever the white man begins to contend for employment with the African, he does not fail to draw reinforcements from the crowded armies of his kindred, who await his call; but the negro cannot recruit on this continent. He can only thin the states that are drawing close their lines for emancipation, and hasten for them the day that must eventually dawn for every state that opens its gates to emigration.

THE NECESSARY ULTIMATE OF SLAVERY.

It is conceded that slavery cannot retrogade to the realms it has left behind, nor can it ever obtain any effective foothold westward or northward of its present limits, however it might be tolerated by law. The whole nature of the country and its productions, and the increasing momentum of the emigrant power, join to forbid the possibility. We have in this vast domain space for forty of the largest states, and we have emigrants landing on our shores at a rate to settle half a dozen of them in a year. If those laboring foreigners do not instantly urge before them into the unsettled territories the population requisite to entitle those territories to a name and place among the sovereignties of the Confederation, they remain in the older states to crowd forward our native born masses to higher aims in newer fields, and to hurry away the lingering obstacle of slave preponderance in the transition states.

Already in the three-quarters just closed, of this year of 1849, it is computed that 300,000 strangers have come to our soil for fortune or refuge; and if this number were evenly divided among five territories demanding admittance to the national councils, they could not be refused— if the constitution is valid. It is not an act of condescension and freegrace in Congress to accept a state when it presents itself under the conditions prescribed by the constitution-it is an imperative duty. It is for the state in the attributes of her sovereign power, of which she cannot divest herself, and which cannot be bartered away in her territorial minority, to arrange her own provisoes, and govern, like all her peers, her own domestic institutions, in her own independent manner. Yet there is, every year, less and less possibility of creating slave states, for the simple and definite lack of slave material.

The map of this union of states offers a cooling balm to whoever has a feverish dread of "extending slavery." It proves it a distinct impossibility, unless we borrow a new population from Africa to people them. When our Revolutionary sires swore to the Federal compact on the altar they had reared to liberty,they and the states they represented were all slaveholding. There was not a spot of free-soil in Christian possession on this continent when they proclaimed the Charter of Independence and Confederation. Then all the great powers of Christendom were slave-traders, and endless were the disputes and diplomacy between most Catholic Spain, most Christian France, and England, "the example of nations," for a monopoly of its honors and profits. They claimed it between them and wrangled for the largest share, as they divided and monopolized this continent. American colonies received the slave-trafficking vices with the

language and laws of their mother-country; yet the Old Thirteen, of their own free-will and judgment, estopped the importation of slaves, though their wide extent of sparsely-settled territory cried aloud for more laborers. Of the brave Old Thirteen, half of the states (for Delaware is on the fence) have withdrawn from slavery, and far more than half of the population and of the acquired territory is with them; and half the area. and people of the remaining states are preparing to follow this illustrious example.

How can a statesman so trifle with his reputation for sagacity as to speak of apprehensions of the "extension of slavery," when he knows the very children of this land of light can prove their fallacy by a reference to a chart of the republic—that true and noble guide in which they are rarely uninstructed. The first sprightly boy of twelve he meets from our public schools, will run his finger up Delaware Bay, along the south line of Pennsylvania, then down the Ohio and up the Mississippi until he touches the north line of Missouri, and again along that line and down the western limits of that state and Arkansas to the Red River, and this child will tell him that all these fifteen largest states of the Union north and west of this line, and all the immense domain beyond them, and all their eleven or twelve millions of inhabitants, are non-slaveholding; and every one of them, from old Massachusetts to young Iowa, by their unbiassed act, for no pre-engagements-if they existed-could bind the will of an independent state. If the grave statesman doubts, this child will also assure him that every one of the forty states yet to arise in this outside domain must inherit the same rights of sovereignty, yet from the circumstances of latitude and production, every one of them will step into Congress a non-slaveholder, as one after the other they receive baptism and confirmation in the congregation of republics.

Again, this youthful finger, anxious to re-assure the old man who dares not trust the Republic and her children, will trace the south line of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri-those states now visibly moving from slave to free cultivation, and who have been, and are the bulwarks, and nursing mothers of the younger states-and then this stripling of twelye, full of the confidence and enthusiasm of a nursling of the Union, will say, When, in 1860, I cast my first vote, all these states will have passed through their transition trials, and this whole area, three times as large as all New-England, and even now having a greater population, will be free-soil and belted with other free-soil states not yet marked out or named in the maps of civilization, besides Nebrasca and Minesota." The eloquent politician takes counsel with his fears and perchance with his ambition, how to retain an excuse for his resounding lamentations on the "immoral and destructive extension of slave limits;" but he cannot impress them on the boy of the common schools, for there he is taught to understand the map, the history, and the constitution of his mother-land, and nothing can shake his loving faith in her wisdom and equity. For all reply to the vehement declarations of the graybeard, that she is slow, false, corrupt, imperfect and unsatisfactory-the hopeful and trusting boy will turn to the second class of transition states, and dashing along the south margin of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and on until he is lost in the unexplored Centralia of the west, he will add, "In 1860 there will be in those states more free white emigrants than slaves; and in ten years, or less, throughout the whole Union,

if foreign emigration remains but at its present rate, the entire black population, free and slave, will be outnumbered by the Europeans who come here for work, and then all this region will be engaged in dismissing their slaves. These facts are taught in our schools; are they deceitful, sir?" The statesman still hesitates to believe in the advancement and integrity of the Confederation, and he asks:

"Where then do you children of to-day, who are to be men and voters in 1860, expect to find the limits and proportions of the positively slaveholding states, when a little later you shall come to the active guardianship of the Republic?"

"It will be confined to South Carolina and Georgia of the original thirteen, and the five states on the Gulf of Mexico-to less than an eighth of the territory, and less than a sixth of the population of the United States."

Well might the rebuked declaimer against the repose and existing policy of the Union pause to enquire why he would arrest the mighty wheel of progress, and endanger the noble machinery of the Federal compact, to brush away a speck of dust that clings to its band of wisdomtempered steel.

TRANSLATIONS FROM HORACE-ODE XIX.

TO GLYCERA.

THOU Cupid's cruel mother,

And thou, bold Bacchus, ye awaken
In me the lust of passions

And loves my soul had quite forsaken.

I love Glycera's whiteness,

More splendid than the Parian hue;

I love her winning boldness,

Her face so dangerous to view.

To conquer me has Venus

Left Cyprus, she forbids my muse

To sing of distant Scythians,

Or flying Parthians' dreaded ruse,

Or aught but her dominion.

Then bring fresh turf, incense and wine;

We may appease the Goddess

By off'ring incense on her shrine.

THE TRUE HISTORY OF ALCIBIADES SCRIBO,

CONTRIBUTOR, CONCOCTor, et cetera.

CHAPTER I.

DUM IN FIERI.

As I happen to be the hero of my own story, I will begin according to the most approved method of hatching flash novels. With the least possible pittance of egotism, I will sketch the portrait of myself.

Let the imaginative reader figure out in his brain a tall, slender, languid, feminine-looking form, with a rich profusion of coarse reddish hair, tortured by hot irons and a world of pains into curls, or, more properly, frizzle a pale transparency of complexion, darkish under the eye; eyes of blue and white, with dilating pupils; a scattered crop of moustache, and whiskers of indeterminate hue; teeth of ivory, and lips of sunny coral-lips always smiling, to show the ivory teeth; small snowy hands, unutterably delicate; and feet that wear number six. If the reader has figured all this with the requisite force and fire of imagination, then he must have quite a vivid and favorable idea of Alcibiades Scribothat is to say, myself.

This much may suffice for my personnel. Of my intellectual and moral material, modesty forbids me to speak; and, besides, as I may hopefully trust, that will become demonstratively evident in the sequel of the story. I may state, however, without incurring the charge of obtrusive vanity, that my brain has long been overburdened with a prodigious load of mathesis and metaphysique. As a specimen of this heavy incubus, you may take, instar omnium, the following: I have in my mind's eye, as well as written out in faultless chirography, all ready for the press, fifty different methods of squaring the circle, and a hundred sliding-scales, for the measurement of the infinite; besides three dozen theorems for the reduction of the transcendental to the status of human intelligibility!

Such was the capital stock with which I started my literary life-trade, and I deem it more than enough to render the name of Alcibiades Scribo an illustrious watch-word of glory among the nations to the end of the earth a hereditament of brilliant renown, and imperishable to all posterity. But unfortunately for my aspirations winging their flight into the far future, unfortunately for my appetite clamorously demanding a few slices out of the pressing present, it so chanced that my ponderous supply both of antiquated and new-fangled lore, met with no corresponding demand in the book-market of New Orleans, the city where I first had the honor of telluric vivification. All my acute quadratures of the circle would not so much as cut me a crust of bread, though I protested, hungrily, my willingness to accept it buttered on one side only, and spread thin as hoarfrost at that!

Here, then, was a perilous problem at the very outset of my valiant career-a problem utterly insolvable by any of the prescribed formula in algebra or the higher fluxions. It was to get a quantity of meat betwixt my

ivory grinders sufficient to egnate the sum total of gastric fluid in my stomach. I gauged the infinite, stewed down the transcendental to the sirrup of nectar, pumped the well of metaphysics dry, but all would not do: I could not breakfast on rainbows, dine on the geometry of sunbeams, or make a hearty supper out of the shadows of moonshine; and as a natural result, I was in great danger of becoming a shadow myself. At length, the thought struck me that, perhaps, I had mistaken my vocation, since I had always been thoroughly persuaded that nature produces no abortions, never creates one of her children to starve, if they will but follow the bent and curvature of his genius Determining to test the matter as to what I was fitted for, by some infallible means, and my coat being excessively seedy, and consequently ripe for such an operation, I planted it in the windows of a pawnbroker's shop, and realized the round sum of fifty With this, I hastened to the office of Doctor Powell, the famous South-western phrenologist, and boldly asked him to run his fingers over, my cranial bumps, and pronounce what I was made for! "Read those organs like a book," I exclaimed," and then tell me what the whole volume is worth!"

cents.

"As the print is rather small," remarked the Doctor, "I will put on my finest glasses." He did so, and proceeded to the examination which was to decide the course of my future destiny.

As I had only demanded a general result, he worked away on my head, for the most part in silence, muttering, now and then, involuntary exclamations, as some strong point arrested his attention.

I could hear the worthy and erudite professor whisper, as if in solilo quy: "Powers of external perception feeble! Comparison enormous! Causality miserably deficient! Fancy large, but true imagination little! Imitation immense, and wonder boundless-would make a glorious humbug! The pole-organ, self-esteem, infinite. Combativeness, precarious! Conscientiousness totally minus!"

My agony was indescribable till the analyst paused, and I inquired with tremulous lips: "Well, Doctor, speak it out; what am I good for?" I was afraid he would answer, "nothing."

"But he replied, with a smile: My dear fellow, nature intended you for a magnificent humbug. Go to New-York, or Boston-turn reformer; exchange all the crotchets within that cranium for geld, and your fortune is made."

"I have no money to pay my passage," I rejoined with a sigh.

"Never mind," said the Doctor; I will lend you fifty dollars, and although I am certain never to get it back again, I can afford to lose that much for the benefit of such an experiment in science."

Accordingly, my new friend counted me out the money necessary to consummate my passage to the north; gave me a letter to the editor of "The Omni-Versus," in New-York, and shaking a cordial farewell on my not ungrateful hand, enjoined me to write him monthly reports detailing minutely the success of my enterprise. I took a berth on board of the brig Fairy Wave, and propitious winds soon wafted me into the desired haven.

I hurried ashore, and lost no time in presenting my epistle of introduction at the office of the Omni-Versus. Unfortunately, however, the editor was just then making the tour of New-England, lecturing for the benefit of the blacks of Senegambia. This was the more to be regretted,