A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, FELIX GRUNDY, whose exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where “death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; SARGEANT S. PRENTISS, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; JOHN J. CRITTENDEN, a farmer’s boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas, shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top; DANIEL D. TOMPKINS of New York, and a large number of others, strong saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical taste has hitherto been content to demand or use. Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned, conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to absorb: JOHN MACPHERSON BERRIEN, born in 1781; THEODORE FRELINGHUYSEN and SAMUEL L. SOUTHARD, in 1787; and WILLIAM C. PRESTON in 1794; with whom are worthily associated HUGH S. LEGARÉ, whose fine face brought its welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and scintillated over every subject; and BENJAMIN F. BUTLER of New York, whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows handsomely in every setting.