nt of strong personality in many of the visitors, but
what gives them their most significant character is the general loyalty
they evince to the constitution, and government, and supreme law of the
land. The President is regarded, for the time, as the embodiment of this
sentiment, and the tacit fealty paid to him, as the supreme law officer,
is far more elevating to the self-balanced and independent mind than if
he were a monarch _ad libitum_, and not for four years merely.
_2d_. I received a notice of my election as a member of the Royal
Northern Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen, of which fact I had been
previously notified by that Society. This Society shows us how the art
of engraving may be brought in as an auxiliary to antiquarian letters;
but it certainly undervalues American sagacity if it conjectures that
such researches and speculations as those of Mr. Magnusen, on the
Dighton Rock, and what it is fashionable now-a-days to call the NEWPORT
RUIN, can satisfy the purposes of a sound investigation of the
Anti-Columbian period of American history.
There was a perfect jam this evening at Blair's. What sort of a
compliment is it to be one of five or six hundred people, not half of
whom can be squeezed into a small house, and not one of whom can pretend
to taste a morsel without the danger of having server and all jammed
down his throat.
_3d_. The mail hunts up everybody. Go where you will, and particularly
to the seat of government, and letters will follow you. Whoever is in
the service of government bears a part of the functions of it, though it
be but an infinitesimal part. Mr. H. Conner, the Saginaw sub-agent, in a
letter of this date, reports the Saginaws at one thousand four hundred
and forty-three souls, and the Swan Creek and Black River Chippewas at
one hundred and ninety-eight. One of the most singular facts in the
statistics of the most of the frontier Indian tribes of the Lakes, is,
in the long run, that they neither _increase_ nor _decline_, but just
keep up a sort of dying existence.
_4th_. Dr. Thomas H. Webb, Secretary of the Rhode Island Historical
Society, announces the plan of that Society in publishing a series of
works illustrating, in the first place, the history and language of the
Indians, and soliciting me to become a contributor of original
observations. The difficulty in all true efforts of our literary history
is the want of means. A man must devote all his leisure in researches,
an
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