signature has a point-like firmness and simplicity. It is a curious
observation, sustained by these autographs, though we know not how
generally correct, that Southern gentlemen are more addicted to a
flourish of the pen beneath their names, than those of the North.

And now we come to the men of a later generation, whose active life
reaches almost within the verge of present affairs; people of dignity,
no doubt, but whose characters have not acquired, either from time or
circumstances, the interest that can make their autographs valuable to
any but the collector. Those whom we have hitherto noticed were the men
of an heroic age. They are departed, and now so utterly departed, as
not even to touch upon the passing generation through the medium of
persons still in life, who can claim to have known them familiarly.
Their letters, therefore, come to us like material things out of the
hands of mighty shadows, long historical, and traditionary, and fit
companions for the sages and warriors of a thousand years ago. In spite
of the proverb, it is not in a single day, or in a very few years, that
a man can be reckoned "as dead as Julius Caesar." We feel little
interest in scraps from the pens of old gentlemen, ambassadors,
governors, senators, heads of departments, even presidents though they
were, who lived lives of praiseworthy respectability, and whose powdered
heads and black knee-breeches have but just vanished out of the drawing-
room. Still less do we value the blotted paper of those whose
reputations are dusty, not with oblivious time, but with present
political turmoil and newspaper vogue. Really great men, however, seem,
as to their effect on the imagination, to take their place amongst past
worthies, even while walking in the very sunshine that illuminates the
autumnal day in which we write. We look, not without curiosity, at the
small, neat hand of Henry Clay, who, as he remarks with his habitual
deference to the wishes of the fair, responds to a young lady's request