shame us out of our
bitter personal contentions, and flash the sentiment of a common nature
into our individual hatreds and oppositions. As grit decomposes society
into an aggregate of strong and weak persons, genius and heroism unite
them in one humanity. Thus, not many years ago, we were all battling
about the higher law and the law to return fugitive slaves. It was
argument against argument, passion against passion, person against
person, grit against grit. The notions advanced regarding virtue and
vice, justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity, were as different
as if the controversy had not been between men and men, but between men
and cattle. There were no signs among the combatants that they had the
common reason and the common instincts of a common nature. Then came a
woman of genius, who refused to credit the horrible conceit that the
diversity was essential, who resolutely believed that the human heart
was a unit, and whose glance, piercing the mist of opinions and
interests, saw in the deep and universal sources of humane and human
action the exact point where her blow would tell; and in a novel
unexampled in the annals of literature for popular effect, shook the
whole public reason and public conscience of the country, by the most
searching of all appeals to its heart and imagination.

THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE.

My name is Esek Pettibone, and I wish to affirm in the outset that it is
a good thing to be well-born. In thus connecting the mention of my name
with a positive statement, I am not unaware that a catastrophe lies
coiled up in the juxtaposition. But I cannot help writing plainly that I
am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have
had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To
be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but
respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick,
I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done _him_ in
the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of
Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway described Mount Washington,
I thought the Duke felt a propensity to "hunch up some." Somehow it is
pleasant to look down on the crowd and have a conscious right to do so.

Left an orphan at the tender age of four years, having no brothers or
sisters to prop me round with young affections and sympathies, I fell
into three pairs of hands, excellent in