o be
somewhat familiar with the tone of feeling in the South,--the _real_
South, or, in other words, the South ten miles from a railroad,--we
were fully prepared for Mr. Russell's statement with regard to the
desire so frequently expressed in 1861 for one of the English princes
to come and reign over a nascent Confederacy. Sympathies and
antipathies are always mutual when they are natural; and never was
there a sympathy more in accordance with the nature of things, than
that which so quickly manifested itself between the struggling
Southern people and the majority of the ruling classes of Great
Britain.

Mr. Randolph took leave of public life, after thirty years of service,
not in the most dignified manner. He furnished another illustration of
the truth of a remark made by a certain queen of Denmark,--"The lady
doth protest too much." Like many other gentlemen in independent
circumstances, he had been particularly severe upon those of his
fellow-citizens who earned their subsistence by serving the public. It
pleased him to speak of members of the Cabinet as "the drudges of the
departments," and to hold gentlemen in the diplomatic service up to
contempt as forming "the tail of the _corps diplomatique_ in Europe."
He liked to declaim upon the enormous impossibility of _his_ ever
exchanging a seat in Congress for "the shabby splendors" of an office
in Washington, or in a foreign mission "to dance attendance abroad
instead of at home." When it was first buzzed about in Washington, in
1830, that General Jackson had tendered the Russian mission to John
Randolph, the rumor was not credited. An appointment so exquisitely
absurd was supposed to be beyond even Andrew Jackson's audacity. The
offer had been made, however. Mr. Randolph's brilliant defence of
General Jackson's bad spelling, together with Mr. Van Buren's
willingness to place an ocean between the new administration and a
master of sarcasm, to whom opposition had become an unchangeable
habit, had dictated an offer of the mission, couched in such seductive
language that Mr. Randolph yielded to it as readily as those ladies
accept an offer of marriage who have often announced their intention
never to marry. Having reached the scene of his diplomatic labors at
the beginning of August, he began to perform them with remarkable
energy. In a suit of black, the best, he declared, that London could
furnish, he was presented to the Emperor and to the Empress, having
first submi