e Governor. After the surrender at Newark,
Cleveland depended upon friendship of cavaliers who gave him hospitality
for his witty companionship, and the good scholarship that made him
valuable as a tutor to their sons, Cleveland, who lives among our poets,
wrote in the first days of his trouble these three prose Characters:--_

THE CHARACTER OF A COUNTRY COMMITTEE-MAN, WITH THE EAR-MARK. OF A
SEQUESTRATOR.

A committee-man by his name should be one that is possessed, there is
number enough in it to make an epithet for legion. He is _persona in
concreto_ (to borrow the solecism of a modern statesman). You may
translate it by the Red Bull phrase, and speak as properly, Enter seven
devils _solus_. It is a well-trussed title that contains both the number
and the beast; for a committee-man is a noun of multitude, he must be
spelled with figures, like Antichrist wrapped in a pair-royal of sixes.
Thus the name is as monstrous as the man, a complex notion of the same
lineage with accumulative treason. For his office it is the Heptarchy,
or England's fritters; it is the broken meat of a crumbling prince, only
the royalty is greater; for it is here, as in the miracle of loaves, the
voider exceeds the bill of fare. The Pope and he ring the changes; here
is the plurality of crowns to one head, join them together and there is
a harmony in discord. The triple-headed turnkey of heaven with the
triple-headed porter of hell. A committee-man is the relics of regal
government, but, like holy relics, he outbulks the substance whereof he
is a remnant. There is a score of kings in a committee, as in the relics
of the cross there is the number of twenty. This is the giant with the
hundred hands that wields the sceptre; the tyrannical bead-roll by which
the kingdom prays backward, and at every curse drops a committee-man.
Let Charles be waived whose condescending clemency aggravates the
defection, and make Nero the question, better a Nero than a committee.
There is less execution by a single bullet than by case-shot.

Now a committee-man is a parti-coloured officer. He must be drawn like
Janus with cross and pile in his countenance, as he relates to the
soldiers or faces about to his fleecing the country. Look upon him
martially, and he is a justice of war, one that hath bound his Dalton up
in buff, and will needs be of the Quorum to the best commanders. He is
one of Mars his lay-elders; he shares in the government, though a
Nonconformis