It is not probable that many of our readers will meet with the volumes, lately published in Washington, containing the correspondence of American diplomatists during the period of the civil war; but, after perusing some of the specimens we shall offer, they will no doubt agree with us in thinking it a pity that these productions should not be generally known. Under any circumstances, most people would find something comical in a set of elderly gentlemen, engaged in important business, exchanging by letter moral sentiments suited to a schoolboy’s theme. But when the compositions thus embellished are of the kind known to the world as State Papers, and when the writers, who thus aim, like the interlocutors in a religious novel, at the instruction of the universe through the medium of dialogue, are American politicians, the effect produced is such as few professed humorists could hope to rival. For most people are aware nowadays that the atmosphere through which those politicians must pass before they can attain to that eminence, one condition of which is the writing of state papers, is much more likely to develop in them the wisdom of the serpent than the guilelessness of the dove. Remembering the pushing and scrambling, the elbowing of vile competitors, the truckling and corruption, the wire-pulling and log-rolling, the acquaintance with all the small and dirty ramifications of tickets and platforms, which success in politics demands in the States, the very last vein of composition we should expect to find these gentlemen especially cultivating would be that in which the sage Imlac addresses Rasselas, or in which the good godmother improves every occasion in a children’s story. A difficulty to believe in the existence of craft or guile or self-interest as motives of political conduct, yielding at last to a surprised and mournful conviction of the sad truth, and a touching and simple style of moralising over human delinquency, are the characteristics, on paper, of the diplomatists who have particularly distinguished themselves in the pleasing and pastoral pursuits we have attempted to enumerate. Everybody who has read American speeches must have noticed in them a tendency to flowery sentiment and to ancient and fish-like metaphors, such as the audiences of the Old World would reject. Why the not very immaculate or poetical classes who constitute a New York mob should especially relish this style of oratory, we cannot explain; but it is the fact that it seems to succeed in America whether the audience be a constituency, or a house of assembly, or the population of a Boston lecture-room, or the entertainers of an American celebrity, or a jury in a criminal case—and all the scribes of their newspapers indulge in the same vein. That it does succeed may appear to be a sufficiently good reason why the parliamentary and stump orators of America should habitually launch at their audiences such sentences as are, on this side of the water, never