And the Richmond Whig, which lately
Lay groveling in mud,
Shows its mulatto insolence,
And prates of 'better blood:'
'We ruled them in the Union; we can thrash them out of bounds:
Ye are mad, ye drunken Helots—cap off, ye Yankee hounds!'
Yet the Northman has the power,
And the North would not be still!
Rise up! rise up, ye rulers!
Send the people where ye will!
Don't organize your victories—fly to battle with your bands—
If you can find the brains to lead, we'll find the willing hands!
JOHN NEAL.
John Neal was born at the close of the last century, in Portland, Maine, where he now resides; and during sixty years it has not been decided whether he or his twin sister was the elder.
He was born in 1793. When he was four weeks old, he was fatherless. His school education began early, as his mother was a celebrated teacher. From his mother's school he went to the town school, where he once declared in our hearing that he 'got licked, frozen, and stupefied.' That he had a rough time, may be inferred from the fact that his parents were Quakers, and he, notwithstanding his peaceful birthright, fought his way through the school as 'Quaker Neal.' He went barefoot in those days through a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in his early life, he went to a Quaker boarding-school at Windham, where he always averred that they starved him through two winters, till it was a luxury to get a mouthful of brown bread that was not a crumb or fragment that some one had left. At this school the boys learned to sympathize in advance with Oliver Twist—to eat trash, till they would quarrel for a bit of salt fish-skin, and to generalize in their hate of Friends from very narrow data. We have heard Neal speak of the two winters he spent in that school as by far the most miserable six or eight months of his whole life.
Very early, we think at the age of twelve years, he was imprisoned behind a counter, and continued there till he was near twenty; and by the time he was twenty one, he had worked his way to a retail shop of his own in Court street, Boston. We next track him to Baltimore, where, in 1815, if we are not out in our chronology, John Pierpont, John Neal, and Joseph L. Lord were in partnership in a wholesale trade. Neal's somersets in business—from partnership to wholesale jobbing, which he went into on his own hook with a capital of one hundred and fifty dollars, and as he once said, in speaking of this remarkable business operation, 'with about as much credit as a lamp-lighter'—may not be any more interesting to the public than they were to him then; so we shall not be particular about them in this chapter of chronicles.
At Baltimore he was very successful, after he got at it, in making money, but failed after the peace in 1816. This failure made him a lawyer. With his characteristic impetuosity, he renounced and denounced trade, determined to study law, and beat the profession with its own weapons.
This impulse drove him at rather more than railroad speed. He studied as if a demon chased him. By computation of then Justice Story, he accomplished fourteen years' hard work in four. During this time he was reading largely in half-a-dozen languages that he knew nothing of when he began, and maintaining himself by writing, either as editor of The Telegraph, coëditor of The Portico, (for which he wrote near a volume octavo in a year or two,) and also as joint-editor of Paul Allen's Revolution, besides a tremendous avalanche of novels and poetry. We have amused ourself casting up the amount of this four years' labor. It seems entirely too large for the calibre of common belief, and we suppose Neal will hardly believe us, especially if he have grown luxurious and lazy in these latter days. Crowded into these four years, we find: for the Portico and Telegraph, and half-a-dozen other papers, ten volumes; 'Keep Cool,' two volumes; 'Seventy-Six,' two volumes; 'Errata,' two volumes; 'Niagara and Goldau,' two volumes; Index to Niles' Register, three volumes; 'Otho,' one volume; 'Logan,' four volumes; 'Randolph,' two volumes; Buckingham's Galaxy, Miscellanies, and Poetry, two volumes; making the incredible quantity of thirty volumes. He could no more have gone leisurely and carefully through this amount of work, than a skater could walk a mile a minute on his skates. The marvel is, that he got through it on any terms, not that he won his own disrespect forever. We do not wonder that he manufactured more bayonets than bee-stings for his literary armory, but we wonder that he became a literary champion at all. With all the irons Neal had in the fire, we are not to expect Addisonian paragraphs; and yet he has in his lifetime been mistaken for Washington Irving, as we can show by an extract from an old letter of his, which we will give by and by.
A power that could produce what Neal produced between 1819 and 1823, properly disciplined and economized, might have performed tasks analogous to those of the lightning, since it has been put in harness and employed to carry the mail. When genius has its day of humiliation for the wasted water of life, Neal may put on sackcloth, for he never economized his power; but for the soul's fire quenched in idleness, or smothered in worldliness, certainly for these years, he need wear no weeds.