pleasant and felicitous; and the poetry of the paper was held to be as valuable an attraction as its politics. Prentice had been in his youth associated with John G. Whittier, and he transplanted the passion for high-class production from the banks of the Connecticut to those of the Ohio, where the fruits were of a richer perfume and more tropical, but lacked the lyric ring and the lofty cry for liberty that have lifted Whittier to an elevation inaccessible save to those who have the expression that goes beyond the range of talent into the realms of the masters, and is dutifully, passionately consecrated and exercised for humanity. Mr. Clay would have astonished any one who had attempted to "interview" him. His idea of journalism was that the newspapers were not worth minding in the hostilities they directed against a public man, unless they touched unkindly upon his personal habits and private affairs; then it was necessary that some one should be held accountable, and the trouble of locating responsibility began. The papers that knew their leader were a convenience, but they should be careful how they published a great man's speeches. Indeed, the last time that Mr. Clay mounted the stump at Lexington he refused to speak until the reporter of the Associated Press, who happened to be Mr. Richard Smith, now of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, was compelled not only to drop his pencil, but to leave the ground. The impertinence of sitting right before an orator addressing his constituents, and taking down his words, was resented, and had to be abandoned. Mr. Smith's success in obtaining a fair summary from a listener who knew politics and had a good verbal memory and took no notes was looked upon as an outrageous example of presumption. The wrath of Mr. Clay at the disrespectful idea of an irresponsible writer for unknown newspapers undertaking to give what he said with the view of scattering it by telegraph, and not asking his permission, was lively, and his language picturesque. After the politics and poetry of Prentice and his contributors, and the death of Clay, there grew up a school of journalism that was devoted to Western literature and political regeneration, or there were those in it that so explained their mission. The Mexican war, meant to extend the area of slavery and the dominion of Democracy, furnished a hero in Zachary Taylor, who, as the Whig candidate, was elected to the Presidency, and the era of a great reformation set in, as was supposed. Taylor was a strong Southern man and a large and humane slave-holder, but his devotion to the Union was unqualified, and he simply made known in the most matterof-fact way to those who were talking of, under circumstances freely fancied and discussed, the dissolution of the Union, that if they attempted such a thing, no matter what happened, he would take the field at the head of the army of the United States, and shoot and hang according to the guilt of those who took up arms against their united country; and the highest praise awarded him was by those who felt themselves menaced,—that he would be "just fool enough to do so." The old man certainly produced a temporary abatement of sectionalism. The death of Taylor, from eating cherry pie after a sunstroke received while laying the foundation of the Washington Monument, confused the country, and in the course of the agitation there were experiences such as no one had imagined, for the strength of the forces in antagonism had not been developed, and were amazingly beyond calculation; and the nation never knew its own greatness until it had been made manifest in the war of the States. There was a time when it seemed to many ardent friends in the central valley of the country that the peace and dignity of the Union depended upon the election of Thomas Corwin to be President of the United States. Corwin, like Clay, was a man of genius, with less will but greater wit than his old leader. With the most genial temper and fascinating speech of his time, he was rich in humor and gracious with wisdom, but he was not destined to be President; and indeed the editorial writing meant to advance his interest was of a feeble sort, dwelling chiefly upon the observance as a sacred obligation of what was called the " Compromises of the Constitution" and the wickedness of despoiling our sister republic, Mexico, of her territory to provide more slave States. All sentimentality about the rights of the Mexicans to land was wiped out by considerations of the glory of our arms in overcoming military antagonism, the addition of the noble realm of Texas to our undisputed empire, the discovery of gold in California, and the sensibility that Jefferson's Louisiana purchase had originally included all we got from Mexico by conquest. The people of the North were growing weary of the alleged obligation to return slaves, and the magnificent extension of the republic was not, in peaceful days, a good thing to complain of. At any rate, opposition to our gains in the Southwest, while it might have been high morals, was not good politics. There was mingled with the feeble editorial matter beautiful poetry written by lovely women, inspired by a dollar per verse. This was the condition of Cincinnati newspaper literature when I deserted a good farm twenty miles northwest of that city and became at College Hill an alleged student and actual writer for the press. The hill was an eminence from which the smoke of Cincinnati could be seen. This personal movement never seemed to me influential in general affairs, but it had an appreciable force so far as I was concerned, and may be worth a few words as an indication of tendencies. The Cincinnati papers spent seven dollars a week each at that time for telegraphic despatches, and regarded themselves as imposed upon by the grinding monopoly that spoiled the regular old news channels through the mails. The papers were printed on flat presses, and the working of two thousand sheets an hour was an achievement that was much applauded, and a material advance to getting off twelve hundred in the same time. No one had dared to hope for one-sixth of the capacity in a press since developed, or of multiplying presses with duplicated plates. The editorial and local matter was mixed in the same type. The most conspicuous feature of the editorial page, save when some important amateur contributed a labored leader, was a poem, original or selected, usually original, and considered a liberal and attractive investment by the publisher who had the power of the purse. The issues of the journals were of four pages each, and the first column of the fourth page contained six times out of ten a bear story, and the other four times a snake, bird, or Indian tale. On Saturdays there was a page of literary matter, and a part of this, which was the fairest display of native and cultivated capacity for the week, was usually a chapter of a novel or novelette that was romantic as to the late red men and the contemporary pioneers and white hunters of Kentucky and Ohio. These were the sunflowers in the garden of the Western world of letters. My first writings for the press were stories of frontier life, adventures in the wilderness, suggested by the still recited recollections of the old men and women who remembered the Indian wars and the first corn-fields on the Miamis. Then came more ambitious contributions, and reviews of the publications current. Harper's Magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, and the Southern Literary Messenger were the great steady lights. Presently there was in the West a slow, but distinct and progressive, movement of journalism; and it was visible in an increased estimate of news and a separation defining the difference between news and literary papers. But journalism was a word never used, not invented, or forbidden, as all the printed sheets, daily or weekly, were newspapers, and those who did the work were editors, locals, and reporters,—not members of the press, or journalists, or of the staff" or corps. No, indeed; any one who had stated that he was of the corps, or on the staff, or engaged as a journalist, would have been excluded from the social circles of the members of the press. These were conservative times, days of delightful communion, no unseemly competition, no strife for "scoops," all acting under a general agreement not to print for a morning newspaper anything arriving later than ten o'clock of the night before, while an evening paper did well if it picked up the happenings of last week. The swim that I was in carried me into news work rather than literary labor, and my first exploit that disturbed the easy-going ways was to sit up until two o'clock for the New York and Baltimore papers, snatch them from the mail-bag myself, and scissor two columns under the head of " Latest by Mail," or " Midnight Mail Matter;" and it was easy thus then to beat the telegraph, which doled out to the unappreciative world about four hundred words a day on the average. There were a few heavy head-lines when Daniel Webster died, but before that they were not obtrusive. It was considered an error, however, for a journal issued on the Monday after Webster died on Saturday not to have the news that he was gone, and the editor who had caused his Monday's issue to be printed on that memorable Saturday night was subjected to ribald remarks, and he grew tired and sad. The death of Webster was one of the first events to which the press of this country did contemporary justice. The rapid growth of news telegraphing put aside for a time bear stories and original poems, but they are turning up in ancient beauty as modern novelties, like old fashions in gowns and bonnets. One of my errors in newspaper management, I think, was in dismissing the bear story, about which hangs an eternal charm, and another mistake, of a graver character, was holding base-ball, as a news source, in contempt; but the most costly of my experiences has been in overrating editorial instruction of the public, and allowing myself to form an unscrupulous habit of telling too much truth. Murat Hahtead. BEING his mother, when he goes away James Whitcomb Biky. "WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY." THE Mississippi River has six hundred affluents whose courses are marked upon the map, and a drainage-area of 1,257,545 square miles. The traveller embarking upon a steamboat can sail from Pittsburg, four thousand three hundred miles, to Fort Benton, Montana, and from Minneapolis, two thousand two hundred miles, to Port Eads, on the Gulf of Mexico. Should he choose to extend his voyage to the head of navigation upon its forty-five navigable tributaries, his outward journey would exceed sixteen thousand miles, through twenty-three States and Territories of the Union. This stupendous water-system is equivalent to a land-locked harbor, |