medium of Lafayette. Franklin was now the ambassador of his country at
the Court of Versailles, enjoying an immense celebrity, caressed by the
French ladies, and idolized alike by the fashionable and the learned,
who saw something sublime and philosophic even in his blue yarn
stockings. Still, as before, he writes with the homeliness and
simplicity that cause a human face to look forth from the old, yellow
sheet of paper, and in words that make our ears re-echo, as with the
sound of his long-extinct utterance. Yet this brief epistle, like the
former, has so little of tangible matter that we are ashamed to copy it.

Next, we come to the fragment of a letter by Samuel Adams; an autograph
more utterly devoid of ornament or flourish than any other in the
collection. It would not have been characteristic, had his pen traced
so much as a hair-line in tribute to grace, beauty, or the elaborateness
of manner; for this earnest-hearted man had been produced out of the
past elements of his native land, a real Puritan, with the religion of
his forefathers, and likewise with their principles of government,
taking the aspect of Revolutionary politics. At heart, Samuel Adams was
never so much a citizen of the United States, as he was a New-Englander,
and a son of the old Bay Province. The following passage has much of
the man in it: "I heartily congratulate yon," he writes from
Philadelphia, after the British have left Boston, "upon the sudden and
important change in our affairs, in the removal of the barbarians from
the capital. We owe our grateful acknowledgments to Him who is, as he
is frequently styled in Sacred Writ, 'The Lord of Hosts.' We have not
yet been informed with certainty what course the enemy have steered. I
hope we shall be on our guard against future attempts. Will not care be
taken to fortify the harbor, and thereby prevent the entrance of ships-
of-war hereafter?"