fine," he says, "the people of Rhode Island are the most ignorant of all the Americans."

the men worked zealously, and the flames were | lates upon the reasons of the poverty of the islsubdued. "This spectacle consoled me," adds and. The ingenious Frenchman attributes it to Brissot, "and I thought that virtue was not en- many causes-the neighborhood of the sea, which tirely extinguished in this people." This amus- tempts the inhabitants to navigation-the want ing and sudden conclusion reveals the character of a market-the want of trees of all kinds-the of his mind, and the value of his impressions. constant elections taking the people from their He immediately begins to find other proofs of re-work-the ignorant style of cultivation. "In maining virtue. We learn that "there are no thefts, nor murders, nor even begging...... the American does not beg nor steal." This is more encouraging; and although he complains of the contrary wind which detained him six days at Newport, and he found his companions at the tavern very disagreeable, yet he went to hear a famous Universalist, Dr. Murray, who preached in the Court-house, and there he saw "pretty women, with immense bonnets, fashionably made, and well dressed; which surprised me, for until then I had seen only hideous women and rags." This is a valuable confession. It shows that Jean Pierre Brissot, Citoyen Français, did not penetrate that society to which de Broglie, Lauzun, Rochambeau, Segur, de Vauban, and the rest, were welcome guests, and which now held itself retired, its days of feasting ended, its great mansions ruined, and its fortunes dilapidated, although it was still handsome, and well-dressed, and wore fashionable bonnets. Brissot's sketch of the general appearance of the town is perhaps" too darkly colored, but it is very interesting; and there can be little doubt that its ruin was a sadder spectacle to the ladies in fashionable bonnets who remembered its perished splendors, than to the vivacious and uneasy traveler.

The tone of Brissot's book is supported by La RochefoucaultLiancourt, who came to Newport from "Newbedfort," in 1795. He had letters to Samuel Elam, whom we have already noticed as the builder of Vaucluse, the sole proprietor upon the island "who did not work with his own hands," "the best of Quakers, and the best of men." He alone, at the time of Liancourt's visit, maintained the former glory of Newport life. Vaucluse was evidently the model-farm of the island. His fellow-farmers had few barns, and the Frenchman remarks the great number of haystacks dispersed all over the island which at the present time also, are charac

With this conclusion he arrives in the town of Newport. It was already reduced to four thousand inhabitants, although Bishop Berkeley, sixty years before, had found six thousand. Its commerce had dwindled to some twelve vessels in the European trade, two or three in the Guinea and Georgia slave-trade, and some fifty or sixty in the domestic and coast-trade. In 1791, the exports amounted to $217,394; in 1795, to $317,860. The houses of Newport, the homes of the beautiful Redwoods, Champlins, Hunters, Lawtons, Malbones, and the rest of the old colonial nobility, the remorseless Frenchman finds small, shabby, and unpainted. Every where are signs of decay. Religion is tolerant. Quakers and Anabaptists are most numerous; "but the people are not religious." The residents upon the island, the small Quaker farmers, come to church in Newport only four times a year, says Rochefoucault. It is an obstinate, litigious, and lazy people." A year or two afterward he passed by Newport once more, and says:

SPOUTING ROCK.

"I saw again with pleasure, not the sad and ruined town, but its charming environs. . . The health of the place is due, doubtless, to the air; but it is remarkable how many young girls die of lung complaints. The tombstones commemorate very young or very old people-few between twenty and seventy."

teristic objects in the landscape. He describes the island as a succession of meadows and corn-fields. Barley is raised also, he says, in great quantities, to supply the breweries of New York and Philadelphia. He bewails the fine orchards and ornamental trees leveled by the British, and the poorly cultivated sandy fields. The farms he found to be usually of seventy acres, few so large as two These were the years of stagnation. Newport hundred, and two or three only had four hundred had ceased to be a gay and busy metropolis; but He speaks with pleasure of the Newport it was full of the evidences of recent ruin, and cheeses, famous throughout America, and specu- | had not yet begun to settle into its present quiet

acres.

.. Its

state of quaint and pensive decay. But during the most interesting on earth. I believe it is unithe last days of its prosperity it was the birth-versally acknowledged to be the most beautiful place of its most illustrious child, and one of the place in our whole range of sea-coast. greatest men of his country, the influence of surface reminds me more of the gentle, graceful whose pure and noble mind, sweet catholicity of slopes of your country than any scene I have sympathy, and unshrinking heroism of temper, visited in America; and its climate is more Enupon the intellectual and moral life of America is glish, being quite humid, though affording us often incalculable. those bright skies of which you see so few in William Ellery Channing was born in New England. . . . In natural beauty, my island port on the 7th of April, 1780, in the house at the does not seem to me inferior to the Isle of Wight. corner of Mary and High streets, and about a In cultivation it will bear no comparison." "I year before the visit of General Washington to am still at this paradise," he says to another Count Rochambeau. His father was Attorney- friend. His residence in Newport was upon the General of the State, and was a lawyer of con- island, about five miles from town, and he somesideration. He married, in 1773, the daughter of times, though rarely, preached in the little wooden William Ellery, one of the old names of New-church near Durfee's Tea-house. port, and one of the signers, for Rhode Island, of the Declaration of Independence. "I must bless God for the place of my nativity," said Dr. Channing in 1836. Yet it was declining from the time of his birth. The tone of general society had not been improved by the war. The West India trade continued, and the habits of a sea-port encourage a laxity of manners and morals, from which the old sea-captains and heavy retired merchants were not free. Profanity and intemperance were the chief vices of the time. 66 I can recollect," he says, "a corruption of morals among those of my own age, which made boyhood a critical, perilous season;" yet "amidst this glorious nature. . . I early received impressions of the great and the beautiful, which I believe have had no small influence in determining my modes of thought and habits of life. I had no professor or teacher to guide me ; but I had two noble places of study-one was yonder beautiful edifice (the Redwood Library), now so frequented and so useful as a public library; then so deserted, that I spent day after day, and sometimes week after week, amidst its dusty volumes, without interruption from a single visitor. The other place was yonder beach, the roar of which has so often mingled with the worship of this place, my daily resort, dear to me in the sunshine, still more attractive in the storm." This was the homage which a great man paid to his birth-place, as he stood, in the fullness of his fame, among its familiar scenes, and said: "The generation which I then knew has almost wholly disappeared." He went to the school of Robert Rogers, then the best in the State. There were many scholars from the South, and among them Washington Allston, who afterward married Channing's sister. But at twelve years of age he left Newport to go to school in New London. He was destined to the medical profession by his father; but soon after he graduated at Harvard College, the young man selected the ministry as his profession, and resided in Boston, as pastor of the Federal Street Unitarian Church, until his death, at Bennington, Vermont, in October, 1842, in his sixty-third year. He constantly returned to Newport, and always with fresh interest and pleasure. Writing, in August, 1832, to Joanna Baillie, he says of it-" A spot, of which I suppose you have never heard, but which is to me

CHANNING HOUSE.*

It was at Robert Rogers' school in Newport that Dr. Channing became acquainted with Washington Allston, whose name is thus associated with the island by his early school history. His only picture now on the island is the Jeremiah, at Miss Gibbs', in Portsmouth. Allston speaks fondly and with admiration of his future brother-in-law, and also of Edward G. Malbone, the miniature painter, who must have been a boy there with Channing, although the latter does not mention him in any published letter. Allston, indeed, only made the acquaintance of Malbone a little before the latter left his birth-place to seek his fortune. Malbone went to another school.

This eminent artist, quite unsurpassed in his department, was born in Newport in 1777. His development began while he was very young, for the favor of the gods toward those they love is early visible, and explains why they die young. The boy began to visit the theatre, fascinated by the brilliant mystery of the stage and the scenery, and at length reached the perilous honor of painting a scene. The theatre was in the upper part of the present market-house, at the corner of Long Wharf and the Parade. He delighted in blowing bubbles; in taking toys to pieces to ascertain their mechanism, that he might imitate them; and flew kites at night, with trailing splendors of

*This is not the house in which Channing was born.

He lived here, however, when a child.

His pictures have a breadth which is not injured by their size. They are full of a sensitive sweetness, which is sure to interest the observer, who may know nothing of the originals. In an unfinished portrait by him, in the possession of Mrs. M. B. Ives, of Providence, the same characteristics are apparent; indicated not less in the graceful, pensive bit of summer landscape, which makes the background of the picture, than in the rare sense of maidenly character, which, as in Overbeck's drawings of the Madonna, seems to have restrained the artist's hand, lest he should draw the lines too grossly. Among the names whose association with Newport enhances the historical interest of the island, that of Malbone will always be pleasantly remembered. The fames of Allston, Stuart, and Malbone, each most eminent in his department, among our artists, all belong to the story of Rhode Island, if the fact of birth and the influences of early childhood constitute a claim.

fire-works, exploding and flashing among the be a gallery of many of the most famous and beaustars, to his great glee and that of his companions. tiful women of the society of the early part of His taste for drawing and painting was not en- the century. "No woman ever lost any beauty tirely cherished by his father; and at seventeen, from his hand," says Allston, in the same breath the young man threw himself upon his talent, with which he praises the fidelity of the likeness. went to Providence, and began to paint minia-" He added a grace of execution all his own." tures. In 1796, he went to Boston, and cemented his friendship with Allston, then at Harvard College, and the friends passed the summer of 1800 in Newport together. In the autumn they went to Charleston, and in May, 1801, sailed in company for England. While in London, Malbone painted his most famous picture. "I am painting one now," he writes at that time, "which I shall bring with me. It is the Hours: the past, the present, and the coming.' Shelly, the most eminent miniature painter of that day in England, had painted a picture of the same subject and with the same title, from which a print has been published. Mr. Fraser says, according to Dunlap, that Malbone told him that the idea was suggested to him by a picture of Shelly's; and Malbone's sister, Mrs. Whitehorne, says, in a letter to Dunlap, "I have heard him say that he selected two figures (and don't recollect from where they were taken), added a third, grouped them, and designed The Hours." " Whatever the origin of the picture, its execution is exquisite. The fresh, clear, sweet color; the tender, feminine character of the heads, which have all the peculiar conventional beauty of the time-the same kind of beauty that appears in many of Stuart's and Stuart Newton's heads-are as lovely now as ever. The picture is very small-it is in the miniature style, which was his most successful manner and stiil remains in the possession of his family, from whom an effort is now mak-solitary rocks and the ruined fort. ing to purchase it, and place it permanently in the Providence Athenæum. It would surely be a matter of regret, that the best work of our best painter, in his kind, should not be retained in his native State.

About the commencement of the century Newport began to revive a little from the total stagnation which followed the war. But it revived only to a quiet and moderate activity. The Fort, upon the Dumpling Rocks upon Conanicut Island, one of the most picturesque objects around the town, was erected under the elder Adams, but never used. There is no pleasanter excursion than an afternoon's sail across the harbor to these

The distilleries began again as general prosperity returned to the country. "Then was heard from Fort Walcott," says an ecstatic and romantic chronicler, "the beat of the reveillé, warbling its sweetest notes along the shore, by those inimiMalbone returned to America in 1802, and table and graceful performers the Hoopers, Mullipainted with great success in all the sea-board gin," &c. "Sam Place's hack," too, began to cities. In the summer he was again at Newport, be in demand, and rattled parties over the island, and was constantly employed. He worked with eager to taste "Aunt Hannah Cornell's shovelunremitting devotion. In 1805, he received $50 cakes." Aunt Hannah made her cakes in the a head, which was considered a good price for house which stood upon the present site of Lawthe times. But in March, 1806, he began to fail. ton's Tea-house. Shovel-cakes are still to be He remained at the South until the warm weath-had by a hungry later generation, and the " er, when he returned to Newport, and laid aside dles" of Mrs. Durfee, in the Tea-house at the his pencil altogether, hoping, in riding and sport- "Glen," shall not want a historian, as they have ing, to regain his lost health. But one day, in not wanted troops of lovers. The Glen is one running and stooping for a bird which he had of the favorite drives, and Mrs. Durfee is the shot, he was seized with a violent hemorrhage. goddess of the Glen. It is a romantic dell, windThe end was near, but the young man submitted ing down through woods to the water, upon the gently to every thing that care and skill suggest-eastern shore of the island. Across the channel ed. He sailed for Jamaica in 1806; but still failing, and longing once more to see his native shores, he turned homeward, but died in Savannah in 1807, in his thirtieth year.

Allston and all his friends loved him. "I looked up to him with admiration," says Allston, of their Newport days. His works, which are mainly miniatures, are very generally diffused through the Atlantic States. A collection of them would

grid

the little town of Compton-on-the-hill lies white upon the shore; but the place is mainly pleasant because it has the rarest rural beauty of the island -trees. It was formerly called Cundall's Mills, from the fulling-mill of Joseph Cundall, which stood upon the site of the present stone factory.

During the commencement of the century Newport was gradually acquiring its present character of grave respectability and decayed

dignity, but it was yet destined to connect its the new charter, and well known to literary fame by name with the most illustrious events of the war his books of European observation, delivered an adof 1812. The father of Commodore Decatur dress, remarkable among such performances for its was a native of Newport; but Oliver Hazard clearness of narration and power of presentation, Perry-descendant in the sixth degree of Thom- which comprises by far the best account of the batas Hazard, one of the earliest settlers of the island, tle. On that day six survivors of the 10th of Sepand whose name has long been honorably borne tember, 1813, were present in the church, and the by one of the most distinguished families in the orator's allusion to them thrilled the assembly to State-was born in Newport in 1785. He en- enthusiasm, and the occasion well deserves mentered the navy in 1798, and served in the expe- tion even in these slight annals of Newport. dition against Tripoli. In 1812, the United States "These our fellow-citizens, who now modestly declared war against England; and on the 6th face this assemblage, the objects of its deep inof December of that year, Captain Stephen Deca-terest and sympathy, it is by the watch just fortur, commanding the United States, brought into ty years to an hour, since, each one at his post, the harbor of Newport the British frigate Mace-doing there his brave duty, they faced on Lake donian. During the winter a fleet of gun-boats Erie the cannon of the enemy. For us, it will was stationed at Newport, commanded by Perry. be for the rest of our lives a grateful rememBut he wished ardently to engage the enemy brance, that, preferred before all others, we have directly, and applied for and obtained the com- | been permitted here to behold these brave men; mand upon Lake Erie. "The work

Captain Perry had to do was, first, to create a fleet, and then with that fleet to beat the British fleet-work enough for a young man of twentyseven. On the morning of the 10th of September, 1813, he sailed from the harbor of the little town of Erie, with nine vessels and fiftyfour guns, to meet the English force of six vessels and sixty-three guns. That day and the dispatch of Perry-"We have met the enemy, and they are ours"-are known with pride by every school-boy now. On the 10th of September, 1853, the citizens of Newport celebrated the fortieth anniversary of that great and decisive battle. George H. Calvert, the first mayor of the city under

and for ourselves, and for all the twenty-five mil- | Longfellow has founded his heroic ballad of the lions of our countrymen, for whom they fought that same name. strong fight, to greet them, and to thank them."