myself, during the late war with Great Britain, chaplain of a regiment, which was fortunately never called to active military duty.  I mention this circumstance with regret rather than pride.  Had I been summoned to actual warfare, I trust that I might have been strengthened to bear myself after the manner of that reverend father in our New England Israel, Dr. Benjamin Colman, who, as we are told in Turell’s life of him, when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, ’fought like a philosopher and a Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged and fired.’  As this note is already long, I shall not here enter upon a discussion of the question, whether Christians may lawfully be soldiers.  I think it sufficiently evident, that, during the first two centuries of the Christian era, at least, the two professions were esteemed incompatible.  Consult Jortin on this head,—­H.W.]

No.  IV

REMARKS OF INCREASE D. O’PHACE, ESQUIRE,

AT AN EXTRUMPERY CAUCUS IN STATE STREET, REPORTED BY MR. H. BIGLOW

[The ingenious reader will at once understand that no such speech as the following was ever totidem verbis pronounced.  But there are simpler and less guarded wits, for the satisfying of which such an explanation may be needful.  For there are certain invisible lines, which as Truth successively overpasses, she becomes Untruth to one and another of us, as a large river, flowing from one kingdom into another, sometimes takes a new name, albeit the waters undergo no change, how small soever.  There is, moreover, a truth of fiction more veracious than the truth of fact, as that of the Poet, which represents to us things and events as they ought to be, rather than servilely copies them as they are imperfectly imaged in the crooked and smoky glass of our mundane affairs.  It is this which makes the speech of Antonius, though originally spoken in no wider a forum than the brain of Shakespeare, more historically valuable than that other which Appian has reported, by as much as the understanding of the Englishman was more comprehensive than that of the Alexandrian.  Mr. Biglow, in the present instance, has only made use of a license assumed by all the historians of antiquity, who put into the mouths of various characters such words as seem to them most fitting to the occasion and to the speaker.  If it be objected that no such oration could ever have been delivered, I answer, that there are few assemblages for speech-making which do not better deserve the title of Parliamentum Indoctorum than did the sixth Parliament of Henry the Fourth, and that men still continue to have as much faith in the Oracle of Fools as ever Pantagruel had.  Howell, in his letters, recounts a merry tale of a certain ambassador of Queen Elizabeth, who, having written two letters,—­one to her Majesty,