eir
ramrods, I cannot but admire, while I deplore, the mistaken devotion of
those heroic officers. _Semel insanivimus omnes._ I was myself, during
the late war with Great Britain, chaplain of a regiment, which was
fortunately never called to active military duty. I mention this
circumstance with regret rather than pride. Had I been summoned to
actual warfare, I trust that I might have been strengthened to bear
myself after the manner of that reverend father in our New England
Israel, Dr. Benjamin Colman, who, as we are told in Turell's life of
him, when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was
attacked by a French privateer, "fought like a philosopher and a
Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged and fired." As this
note is already long, I shall not here enter upon a discussion of the
question, whether Christians may lawfully be soldiers. I think it
sufficiently evident, that, during the first two centuries of the
Christian era, at least, the two professions were esteemed incompatible.
Consult Jortin on this head.--H. W.]

No. IV.

REMARKS OF INCREASE D. O'PHACE, ESQUIRE, AT AN EX-TRUMPERY
CAUCUS IN STATE STREET, REPORTED BY MR. H. BIGLOW.

[The ingenious reader will at once understand that no such speech as the
following was ever _totidem verbis_ pronounced. But there are simpler
and less guarded wits, for the satisfying of which such an explanation
may be needful. For there are certain invisible lines, which as Truth
successively overpasses, she becomes Untruth to one and another of us,
as a large river, flowing from one kingdom into another, sometimes takes
a new name, albeit the waters undergo no change, how small soever. There
is, moreover, a truth of fiction more veracious than the truth of fact,
as that of the Poet, which represents to us things and events as they
ought to be, rather than servilely copies them as they are imperfectly
imaged in the crooked and smoky glass of our mundane affairs. It is this
which makes the speech of Antonius, though originally spoken in no wider
a forum than the brain of Shakspeare, more historically valuable than
that other which Appian has reported, by as much as the understanding of
the Englishman was more comprehensive than that of the Alexandrian. Mr.
Biglow, in the present instance, has only made use of a licence assumed
by all the historians of antiquity, who put into the mouths of various
characters such words as seem to them most f