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mind, with which I think you must be gratified. I made inquiries of Mr. Abbot concerning him. He observed that he was a very fine lad; that he appeared to have the stamina of a distinguished man; that he took his rank among the first scholars in the academy, and that he wished I would send him half a dozen such boys."

The word of promise thus spoken to the father's ear has not been broken to the world.

In 1817, before he had completed his seventeenth year, the youth received his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge. The next year he went to Europe, and studied at Gottingen and Berlin, where he availed himself of the best opportunities of literary culture presented by those eminent universities. Before his return to America, in 1822, he had made the tour of England, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. His mind was now richly furnished with the treasures of ancient literature, with the superadded modern metaphysical culture of the German universities. The thoroughness of his studies is shown in the philosophical summaries of Ronan history and policy, and of the literature of Germany, then rapidly gaining the ascendant, which he not long after published in America; while a thin volume of poems, published at Boston in 1823, witnesses to his poetical enthusiasm for the arts and nature, as he traversed the ruins of Italy and the sublime scenery of Switzerland. He also at this time, from his eighteenth to his twentyfourth year, wrote a series of poetical translations of some of the chief minor poems of Schiller, Goethe, and other German authors, which appeared in the North American Review, and have been lately revived by the author, in his Collection of Miscellanies. He also wrote for the early volumes of Walsh's American Quarterly Review, a number of articles, marked by their academic and philosophic spirit; among others, a striking paper on the Doctrine of Temperaments; a kindred philosophical Essay on Ennui; and papers on Poland and Russia, of historical sagacity and penetration.

Immediately on his return to the United States, Mr. Bancroft had been appointed Tutor of Greek at Harvard, where he continued for a year; subsequently carrying out his plans of education, in connexion with his friend Dr. J. G. Cogswell, as principal of the Round Hill school, at Northampton, Massachusetts.

Mr. Bancroft early became a politician, attaching himself to the Democratic party. One of the fruits of his promotion of its interests was his appointment from President Van Buren, in 1888, to the collectorship of the port of Boston. He retained this office till 1841. In 1844 he was the candidate of the Democratic minority, in Massachusetts, for the office of Governor. He was invited by President Polk, in 1845, to a seat in the Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy, the duties of which he discharged with his customary energy and efficiency in the cause of improvement. The next year he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, and held this distinguished position till 1849. He then returned to the United States, and became a resident of the city of New York.

Here he has established his home, and here he VOL. II.-20

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The most important work of Mr. Bancroft's literary career, his History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, appeared in a first volume, in 1884. It struck a new vein in American History, original in design and conception. Terse and pointed in style, in brief, ringing sentences, it took the subject out of the hands of mere annalists and commentators, and raised it to the dignity and interest of philosophical narration. The original preface stamped the character of the work, in its leading motives, the author's sense of its importance, and his reliance on the energetic industry which was to accomplish it. The picturesque account of the colonial period gave the public the first impression of the author's vivid narrative; while the tribute to Roger Williams was an indication of the allegiance to the principles of liberty which was to characterize the work. The second and third followed, frequently appearing in new editions.

The interval of Mr. Bancroft's absence in Europe was profitably employed in the prosecution of his historical studies, for which his rank of ambassador gave him new facilities of original research in the government archives of London and Paris. Approaching the revolutionary period he was at that stage of the narrative where this aid became of the utmost importance. It was freely rendered. The records of the State Paper Office of Great Britain, including a vast array of military and civil correspondence, and legal and commercial detail, were freely placed at his disposal by the Earl of Aberdeen, Viscount Palmerston, Earl Grey, and the Duke of Newcastle, who then held the office of Secretary of State. The records of the Treasury, with its series of Minutes and Letter Books, were, in like manner, opened by Lord John Rus

sell while in the British Museum and in the private collections of various noble families, the most interesting manuscripts were freely rendered to the historian. Among the latter were the papers of Chatham, the Earl of Shelburne, the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Dartmouth, and several hundred notes which passed between George the Third and Lord North.

M. Guizot, the French minister, extended similar courtesies in Paris, where Mr. Bancroft was aided by M. Mignet, M. Lamartine, and De Tocqueville. The relations of America with other European states of the Continent were also examined.

In addition to these resources abroad, the progress of his work secured to Mr. Bancroft at home frequent valuable opportunities of the examination of original authorities in private and public collections in all parts of the country. Among these are the numerous manuscripts of the apostle of American liberty, Samuel Adams.

Thus armed, and, with the daily increasing resources of the already vast American historical library, fed by a thou-and rills of publication, of biography, family memoirs, town and state histcries, and the numerous modes of antiquarian development, Mr. Bancroft enters on each successive volume of his national work with an increased momentum. Resuming the record in 1852 with the publication of the fourth volume, which traces the period from 1748, the author advanced rapidly to the fifth and sixth, the last of which, bringing the narrative to the immediate commencement of the Revolution preceding the actual outbreak in Massachusetts, appeared in 1854. Here, on the threshold of the new era, the author pauses for a while; we may be sure to gather new strength for the approaching conflict.

The speciality of Mr. Bancroft's history is its prompt recognition and philosophical development of the elements of liberty existing in the country -from the settlement of the first colonists to the matured era of independence. He traces this spirit in the natural conditions of the land, in men and in events. History, in his view, is no accident or chance concurrence of incidents, but an organic growth which the actors control, and to which they are subservient. The nation became free, he maintains, from the necessity of the human constitution, and because it deliberately willed to be free. To this end, in his view, all thoughts, all passions, all delights ministered. To detect this prevailing influence, this hidden impulse to the inarch of events, in every variety of character, in every change of position, whether in the town meeting of New England or the parliament of England; whether in the yeoman or the governor; in the church or at the bar; in the habits of the sailor or of the pioneer; in the rugged independence of New England or the uneasy sufferance of Louisiana: this is our historian's ever present idea. The ardor of the pursuit may sometimes bend reluctant facts to its purpose, and the keener eye of retrospection may read with more certainty what lurked dimly in anticipation; but the main deduction is correct. The history of America is the history of liberty. The author never relaxes his grasp of this central law. Hence the manly vigor and epic grandeur of his story.

With this leading idea Mr. Bancroft associates

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George Bancuft

In 1855 Mr. Bancroft published a volume of Literary and Historical Miscellanies, containing a portion of his early Essays from the Reviews; his poetical translations from the German; several historical articles to which we have alluded, and a few occasional discourses, including an address in memory of Channing, in 1842; an oration commemorative of Andrew Jackson, spoken at Washington in 1845, and the eloquent discourse at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Historical Society, on "The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race"-topics which were handled by the light both of modern science and philosophy.

To this enumeration of Mr. Bancroft's writings we may add an Abridgment of his History of the Colonization of the United States; and among other speeches and addresses, a lecture on "The Culture, the Support, and the Object of Art in a Republic," in the course of the New York Historical Society in 1852; and another before the Mechanics' Institute of New York in 1853, on "The Office, Appropriate Culture, and Duty of the Mechanic."

COMPARISON OF JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN.*

Every hope of reform from parliament vanished. Bigotry and tyranny prevailed more than ever, and Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the whole energy of his mind to accomplish the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that

From the Second Volume of the History

"heavenly end," he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom; as with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his everoverflowing heart, and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired, and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and "surpassing in speculative endowments," conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering; familiar with the royal family; intimate with Sunderland and Sydney; acquainted with Russell, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age, he valued the promptings of a free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the single-minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke, when, twelve years before, he had framed a constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance might scrawl their experience; to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed, that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, "Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;" to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of parents to preserve their children not to be understood without reward and punishment;" Penn loved his children, with not a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and aunounces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that

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be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only

in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts;" Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly, that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in;" Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth, and virtue, and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for;" Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "Popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore, stretching out his arms, he built-such are his own words" a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions; which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russell stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington, and Shaftesbury, and Locke, thought government should rest on property,-Penn did not despair of humanity, and, though all history and experience denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man's capacity for selfgovernment. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "THE HOLY EXPERIMENT.”

BRADDOCK'S Defeat, 1755.

Early in the morning of the ninth of July, Braddock set his troops in motion. A little below the Youghiogeny they forded the Monongahela, and marched on the southern bank of that tranquil stream, displaying outwardly to the forests the perfection of military discipline, brilliant in their dazzling uniform, their burnished arms gleaming in the bright summer's sun, but sick at heart, and enfeebled by toil and unwholesome diet. At noon they forded the Monongahela again, and stood between the rivers that form the Ohio, only seven miles distant from their junction. A detachment of three hundred and fifty men, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gage, and closely attended by a working party of two hundred and fifty, under St. Clair, advanced cautiously, with guides and flanking parties, along a path but

twelve feet wide, towards the uneven woody country that was between them and Fort Duquesne. The general was following with the columns of artillery, baggage, and the main body of the army, when a very heavy and quick fire was heard in the front.

Aware of Braddock's progress by the fidelity of their scouts, the French had resolved on an ambuscade. Twice in council the Indians declined the enterprise. "I shall go," said De Beaujeu, "and will you suffer your father to go alone? I am sure we shall conquer;" and, sharing his confidence, they pledged themselves to be his companions. At an early hour, Contrecœur, the commandant at Fort Duquesne, detached De Beaujeu, Dumas, and De Lignery, with less than two hundred and thirty French and Canadians, and six hundred and thirty-seven savages, under orders to repair to a favorable spot selected the preceding evening. Before reaching it they found themselves in the presence of the English, who were advancing in the best possible order; and De Beaujeu instantly began an attack with the utmost vivacity. Gage should, on the moment, and without waiting for orders, have sent support to his flanking parties. His indecision lost the day. The onset was met courageously, but the flanking guards were driven in, and the advanced party, leaving their two six-pounders in the hands of the enemy, were thrown back upon the vanguard which the general had sent as a reinforcement, and which was attempting to form in face of a rising ground on the right. Thus the men of both regiments were heaped together in promiscuous confusion, among the dense forest trees and thickset underwood. The general himself hurried forward to share the danger and animate the troops; and his artillery, though it could do little harm, as it played against an enemy whom the forest concealed, yet terrified the savages and made them waver. At this time De Beaujeu fell, when the brave and humane Dumas, taking the command, gave new life to his party: sending the savages to attack the English in flank, while he with the French and Canadians, continued the combat in front. Already the British regulars were raising shouts of victory, when the battle was renewed, and the Indians, posting themselves most advantageously behind large trees "in the front of the troops and on the hills which overhung the right flank," invisible, yet making the woods re-echo their war-whoop, fired irregularly, but with deadly aim, at "the fair mark" offered by the "compact body of men beneath them." None of the English that were engag ed would say they saw a hundred of the enemy, and "many of the officers, who were in the heat of the action the whole time, would not assert that they saw one."

The combat was obstinate, and continued for two hours with scarcely any change in the disposition of either side. Had the regulars shown courage, the issue would not have been doubtful: but terrified by the yells of the Indians, and dispirited by a manner of fighting such as they had never imagined, they would not long obey the voice of their officers, but fired in platoons almost as fast as they could load, aiming among the trees, or firing into the air. In the midst of the strange scene, nothing was so sublime as the persevering gallantry of the officers. They used the utmost art to encourage the men to move upon the enemy; they told them off into small parties of which they took the lead; they bravely formed the front; they advanced sometimes at the head of small bodies, sometimes separately, to recover the cannon, or to get possession of the hill; but were sacrificed by the soldiers, who declined to follow them, and even fired upon them from the rear. Of eighty-six officers, twenty-six were killed,—

among them, Sir Peter Halket,-and thirty seven were wounded, including Gage, and other field offi cers. Of the men, one half were killed or wounded, Braddock braved every danger. His secretary was shot dead; both his English aids were disabled early in the engagement, leaving the American alone to distribute his orders. "I expected every moment," said one whose eye was on Washington, "to see him fall. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him." "An Indian chiefsuppose a Shawnee-singled him out with his rifle, and bade others of his warriors do the same. Two horses were killed under him; four balls penetrated his coat." "Some potent Manitou guards his life," exclaimed the savage. "Death," wrote Washington, "was levelling my companions on every side of me; but, by the all-powerful dispensatibns of Providence, I have been protected." "To the public," said Davies, a learned divine, in the following month, "I point out that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country." Who is Mr. Washington?" asked Lord Halifax a few months later. "I know nothing of him," he added, but that they say he behaved in Braddock's action as bravely as if he really loved the whistling of bullets." The Virginia troops showed great valor, and were nearly all massacred. three companies, scarcely thirty men were left alive. Captain Peyronney and all his officers, down to a corporal, were killed; of Polson's, whose bravery was honored by the Legislature of the Old Dominion, only one was left. But those they call regulars, having wasted their ammunition, broke and ran, as sheep before hounds, leaving the artillery, provisions, baggage, and even the private papers of the general a prey to the enemy. The attempt to rally them was as vain as to attempt to stop the wild bears of the mountain." "Thus were the English most scandalously beaten." Of privates, seven hundred and fourteen were killed or wounded; while of the French and Indians, only three officers and thirty men fell, and but as many more wounded.

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Braddock had five horses disabled under him; at last a bullet entered his right side, and he fell mortally wounded. He was with difficulty brought off the field, and borne in the train of the fugitives. Ai the first day he was silent; but at night he roused himself to say, "Who would have thought it?" The meeting at Dunbar's camp made a day of confusion. On the twelfth of July, Dunbar destroyed the remaining artillery, and burned the public stores and the heavy baggage, to the value of a hundred thousand pounds, pleading in excuse that he had the orders of the dying general, and being himself resolved, in midsummer, to evacuate Fort Cumberland, and hurry to Philadelphia for winter quarters. Accordingly, the next day they all retreated. At night Braddock roused from his lethargy to say, "We shail better know how to deal with them another time," and died. His grave may still be seen, near the national road, about a mile west of Fort Necessity.

RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.*

But if aristocracy was not excluded from towns, still more did it pervade the rural life of England. The climate not only enjoyed the softer atmosphere that belongs to the western side of masses of land, but was further modified by the proximity of every part of it to the sea. It knew neither long continuing heat nor cold; and was more friendly to daily employment throughout the whole year, within

From the Chapter, England as it was in 1763, in the Fifth Volume of the History.

doors or without, than any in Europe. The island was a little world" of its own; with a "happy breed of men" for its inhabitants, in whom the hardihood of the Norman was intermixed with the gentler qualities of the Celt and the Saxon, just as nails are rubbed into steel to temper and harden the Damascus blade. They loved country life, of which the mildness of the clime increased the attractions; since every grass and flower and tree that had its home between the remote north and the neighborhood of the tropics would live abroad, and such only excepted as needed a hot sun to unfold their bloom, or concentrate their aroma, or ripen their fruit, would thrive in perfection: so that no region could show such a varied wood. The moisture of the sky favored a soil not naturally very rich: and so fructified the earth, that it was clad in perpetual verdure. Nature had its attractions even in winter. The ancient trees were stripped indeed of their foliage; but showed more clearly their fine proportions, and the undisturbed nests of the noisy rooks among their boughs; the air was so mild, that the flocks and herds still grazed on the freshly springing herbage; and the deer found shelter enough by crouching amongst the fern; the smoothly shaven grassy walk was soft and yielding under the foot; nor was there a month in the year in which the plough was idle. The large landed proprietors dwelt often in houses which had descended to them from the times when England was gemmed all over with the most delicate and most solid structures of Gothic art. The very lanes were memorials of early days, and ran as they had been laid out before the conquest; and in mills for grinding corn, water-wheels revolved at their work just where they had been doing so for at least eight hundred years. Hospitality also had its traditions; and for untold centuries Christmas had been the most joyous of the seasons.

The system was so completely the ruling element in English history and English life, especially in the country, that it seemed the most natural organization of society, and was even endeared to the dependent people. Hence the manners of the aristocracy, without haughtiness or arrogance, implied rather than expressed the consciousness of undisputed rank; and female beauty added to its loveliness the blended graces of dignity and humility-most winning, where acquaintance with sorrow had softened the feeling of superiority, and increased the sentiment of compassion.

Yet the privileged class defended its rural pleasures and its agricultural interests with impassioned vigilance. The game laws parcelling out among the large proprietors the exclusive right of hunting, which had been wrested from the king as too grievous a prerogative, were maintained with relentless severity; and to steal or even to hamstring a sheep was as much punished by death as murder or treason. During the reign of George the Second, sixty-three new capital offences had been added to the criminal laws, and five new ones, on the average, continued to be discovered annually; so that the criminal code of England, formed under the influence of the rural gentry, seemed written in blood, and owed its mitigation only to executive clemency.

But this cruelty, while it encouraged and hardened offenders, did not revolt the instinct of submission in the rural population. The tenantry, for the most part without permanent leases, holding lands at a moderate rent, transmitting the occupation of them from father to son through many generations,

With calm desires that asked but little room, elung to the lord of the manor as ivy to massive old walls. They loved to live in his light, to lean on his

support, to gather round him with affectionate deference rather than base cowering; and, by their faithful attachment, to win his sympathy and care; happy when he was such an one as merited their love, They caught refinement of their superiors, so that their cottages were carefully neat, with roses and honeysuckles clambering to their roofs. They cultivated the soil in sight of the towers of the church, near which reposed the ashes of their ancestors for almost a thousand years. The whole island was mapped out into territorial parishes, as well as into counties, and the affairs of local interest, the assessment of rates, the care of the poor and of the roads, were settled by elected vestries or magistrates, with little interference from the central government. The resident magistrates were unpaid, being taken from among the landed gentry; and the local affairs of the county, and all criminal affairs of no uncommon importance, were settled by them in a body at their quarterly sessions, where a kind-hearted landlord often presided, to appal the convicted offender by the solemn earnestness of his rebuke, and then to show him mercy by a lenient sentence.

Thus the local institutions of England shared the common character; they were at once the evidence of aristocracy and the badges of liberty.

THE BOSTON MASSACRE, 1770.

On Friday the second day of March a soldier of the Twenty-ninth asked to be employed at Gray's Ropewalk, and was repulsed in the coarsest words. He then defied the ropemakers to a boxing match; and one of them accepting his challenge, he was beaten off. Returning with several of his companions, they too were driven away. A larger number came down to renew the fight with clubs and cutlasses, and in their turn encountered defeat. By this time Gray and others interposed, and for that day prevented further disturbance.

There was an end to the affair at the Ropewalk, but not at the barracks, where the soldiers inflamed each other's passions, as if the honor of the regiment were tarnished. On Saturday they prepared bludgeons, and being resolved to brave the citizens on Monday night, they forewarned their particular acquaintance not to be abroad. Without duly restraining his men, Carr, the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Twenty-ninth, made complaint to the LieutenantGovernor of the insult they had received.

The council, deliberating on Monday, seemed of opinion, that the town would never be safe from quarrels between the people and the soldiers as long as soldiers should be quartered among them. In the present case the owner of the Ropewalk gave satisfaction by dismissing the workmen complained of.

The officers should, on their part, have kept their men within the barracks after night-fall. Instead of it they left them to roam the streets. Hutchinson should have insisted on measures of precaution, but he, too, much wished the favor of all who had influence at Westminster.

Evening came on. The young moon was shining brightly in a cloudless winter sky, and its light was increased by a new fallen snow. Parties of soldiers were driving about the streets, making a parade of valor, challenging resistance, and striking the inhabitants indiscriminately with sticks or sheathed

cutlasses.

A band, which rushed out from Murray's Barracks in Brattle street, armed with clubs, cutlasses, and bayonets, provoked resistance, and an affray ensued. Ensign Maul, at the gate of the barrackyard, cried to the soldiers, "Turn out and I will stand by you; kill them; stick them; knock them down; run your bayonets through them;" and one

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