pieces of his own
day, and of the generation immediately preceding. These are things
easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too
expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all
flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the
vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in
our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our
sayings and doings. They are too light and volatile to be caught by the
Copyright Act, which so carefully deposits our quartos and octavos in
the privileged libraries. It is pleasant, by the way, at this moment, to
observe that the eminent scholar who has charge of the chief portion of
Wodrow's gatherings, as keeper of the Advocates' Library, is following
his example, by preserving a collection of the pamphlets of the present
century which will keep our posterity in employment, if they desire to
unwind the intricacies of all our civil and ecclesiastical sayings and
doings.

Wodrow carried on an active correspondence about matters of contemporary
policy, and the special inquiries connected with his History: selections
from this mass have furnished three sturdy volumes. Besides pamphlets,
he scraped together quantities of other people's manuscripts--some of
them rising high enough in importance to be counted State papers. How
the minister of the quiet rural parish of Eastwood could have got his
hands on them is a marvel, but it is fortunate that they were saved from
destruction; and it is nearly equally fortunate that they have been well
ransacked by zealous club-book makers, who have by this time probably
exhausted the better part of their material. In the next place, Wodrow
left behind several biographies of eminent members of his own Church,
its saints and martyrs; and goodly masses out of this storehouse have
also been printed.

But by far the most luxurious morsel in the worthy man's intellectual
larder was not intended to reach the profane vulgar, but destined for
his own special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his
private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his
imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly
cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection
to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which
their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In
steno