To tell you the truth, I am afraid that I have gained access here on false pretences; for I am no Cavalier at all; just plain Scotch-Irish; one of those Scotch-Irish southerners who ate no fire in the green leaf and has eaten no dirt in the brown, and who, accepting, for the moment, the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once sought to ascribe to them—­descriptive labels at once classifying and separating North and South—­verbal redoubts along that mythical line called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists of other days to be no bridges—­I am much disposed to say, “A plague o’ both your houses!”

Each was good enough and bad enough in its way, whilst they lasted; each in its turn filled the English-speaking world with mourning; and each, if either could have resisted the infection of the soil and climate they found here, would be to-day striving at the sword’s point to square life by the iron rule of Theocracy, or to round it by the dizzy whirl of a petticoat!  It is very pretty to read about the Maypole in Virginia and very edifying and inspiring to celebrate the deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers.  But there is not Cavalier blood enough left in the Old Dominion to produce a single crop of first families, whilst out in Nebraska and Iowa they claim that they have so stripped New England of her Puritan stock as to spare her hardly enough for farm hands.  This I do know, from personal experience, that it is impossible for the stranger-guest, sitting beneath a bower of roses in the Palmetto Club at Charleston, or by a mimic log-heap in the Algonquin Club at Boston, to tell the assembled company apart, particularly after ten o’clock in the evening!  Why, in that great, final struggle between the Puritans and the Cavaliers—­which we still hear sometimes casually mentioned—­although it ended nearly thirty years ago, there had been such a mixing up of Puritan babies and Cavalier babies during the two or three generations preceding it, that the surviving grandmothers of the combatants could not, except for their uniforms, have picked out their own on any field of battle!

Turning to the Cyclopaedia of American Biography, I find that Webster had all the vices that are supposed to have signalized the Cavalier, and Calhoun all the virtues that are claimed for the Puritan.  During twenty years three statesmen of Puritan origin were the chosen party leaders of Cavalier Mississippi:  Robert J. Walker, born and reared in Pennsylvania; John A. Quitman, born and reared in New York, and Sargent S. Prentiss, born and reared in the good old State of Maine.  That sturdy Puritan, John Slidell, never saw Louisiana until he was old enough to vote and to fight; native here—­an alumnus of Columbia College—­but sprung from New England ancestors.  Albert Sidney Johnston, the most resplendent of modern Cavaliers—­from tip to toe a type of the species—­the very rose and expectancy of the young Confederacy—­did not have a