Firstly, MANNERS.—Historians, especially in modern times, are accustomed to entertain their readers with varied and variegated descriptions of the manners of the people, period, or century under their telescopes; and as we have a first-rate historical Dollond, adjusted for day and night observations, and can bring down a past age so near as to enable our readers to see not only the cut of their great-great-great-grandfather’s coats, the quality of their metal buttons on the outside, and of the metal within their pockets, but can note and enjoy even the shape of their mouths, the character of the good things going in, and the better things coming out of them; nay, can catch and fix the evanescent and subtle flavor of their humor and wit, as they exhale in rosy _nimbi_, we shall not withhold some of the latest and most valuable discoveries we have been thus enabled to make. Some near-sighted people find a difficulty, as they look about upon their contemporaries, in arriving at results which they can crystallize around class nodules. They see only individual specimens, and wonder how the photographic historian can bring out by his machine picturesque groups, clothed in appropriate costume, artistically arranged. But this difficulty arises from the unhappy fact that the objects observed lie directly under their eye. The others lie without. Besides such obtuse-eyed watchers of their own times, who experience an embarrassment in getting fitting words to express their ideas of an average man, age, habits, or morals,—a process much like that of producing our current Sherry wines by boiling down and simmering off a variety of ingredients,—lose sight of the precipitating, coagulating, forming mass, in their anxiety to note the frisky bubbles that come up to the agitated surface. Besides, long-sighted chroniclers can see and describe the habits and manners of the distant past with more clearness, and certainly with more telling effect, than the troublesome present, with its distressing individualities and exceptions, lying, amid the disturbing cross-lights of actual, hard, well-known facts. If, in bringing up the ghost of a period long buried, we get the wrong dress on it, or chance to summon back a spectre, invested with habits that fitted another epoch as well or better, we are not teased or contradicted by any foolish survivor, pushed by children-like questions, or worried into redness of face by puzzling inquiries or an awkward silence. And so reasoning, we feel sure that, if our inspection of the accoutrements, manœuvres, and drill of the companies that march before us in the seventeenth century, is not absolutely accurate, the fault will not lie in the distance, nor in the atmosphere, nor yet in the instrument, but in one of these two causes, either that they have sent up the wrong squads or else that the originals had not, after all, much manners to be inspected.