George III. got a terrible peppering from that machine; but as he lived forty-four years afterwards, it is fair to presume that his royal, burly Hanoverian person, rolling over and over in bucolic clover, repaired without difficulty dents and shocks caused by applications administered at such a distance. For seven years following he was in a great state of irritation, and worked hard to prevent the results with which that Declaration concluded, namely, a determination to cut all connection with him and his little island ways. How this great struggle, thus earnestly begun, was carried on, and its final issue, must be the office of future chapters to tell. That first Fourth caused a very gunpowdery smell throughout the Colonies for seven succeeding years, and has touched off more fire-crackers since than would fence in China with a wall higher than its present one. The lever then thrust beneath the corner-stone of civil right, to pry it out of its undisturbed imbedment into its appropriate place, was handled by ungloved hands; but the anniversary of the event itself cannot be now handled by the municipal jollifiers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and even Chicago, with less than six pairs of gloves each, while the very common councilmen sometimes get twelve pairs apiece for the occasion. Blessings on all the Fourth of Julys up to 1850! What occasions for tar-barrel eloquence, going off into flaming tropes and figures, have they not been! That has not only been “the birthday of freedom,” but the natal initiation into civic or military renown of many a village tyro. The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator.