the glowing and crumbling streets, the broad, black firmament of smoke,
and the blast or wind that sprang up with the conflagration and roared
behind it. It would be more effective to mark out a single family at the
moment when the flames caught upon an angle of their dwelling: then would
ensue the removal of the bedridden grandmother, the cradle with the
sleeping infant, and, most dismal of all, the dying man just at the
extremity of a lingering disease. Do but imagine the confused agony of
one thus awfully disturbed in his last hour; his fearful glance behind at
the consuming fire raging after him, from house to house, as its devoted
victim; and, finally, the almost eagerness with which he would seize some
calmer interval to die! The Great Fire must have realized many such a
scene.

Doubtless posterity has acquired a better city by the calamity of that
generation. None will be inclined to lament it at this late day, except
the lover of antiquity, who would have been glad to walk among those
streets of venerable houses, fancying the old inhabitants still there,
that he might commune with their shadows, and paint a more vivid picture
of their times.


III. THE OLD TORY.

Again we take a leap of about twenty years, and alight in the midst of
the Revolution. Indeed, having just closed a volume of colonial
newspapers, which represented the period when monarchical and
aristocratic sentiments were at the highest,--and now opening another
volume printed in the same metropolis, after such sentiments had long
been deemed a sin and shame,--we feel as if the leap were more than
figurative. Our late course of reading has tinctured us, for the moment,