Ir is not true that Mr. Van Buren is in any sense a "fallen man. Nothough no longer, indeed, a candidate for reëlection to the highest office of political station on the face of the globe -though he has, indeed, descended irrevocably, from that brilliant and powerful part which he has so long sustained on the stage of public affairs, into the shaded obscurity of simple private citizenship, side by side with the humblest individual unknown beyond the limits of his native village; yet in all the higher and truer appreciation of dignity of political position, based on the respect and encircled by the affections of a great party-nay, a great nation-there has been no moment in Mr. Van Buren's whole career in which he has stood, consciously to himself and confessedly by all, on a nobler elevation than that which he now occupies and adorns. Fortune and foes have conspired to do more for him, than friends foresaw, or could have themselves effected. We should not have envied him the curule chair of restored power; we do envy him the Pantheon niche to which he has been transferred by the very act that excluded him from the former.

Mr.Van Buren's career as a statesman is now, therefore, closed; to use his own emphatic though melancholy word, "forever." Nor indeed-(strongly as we would desire to deprecate the resolution he has himself avowed)-is it likely

that in any form or capacity he will ever allow himself to be again drawn forth, from a retirement amply provided with all the elements of domestic and social happiness, into any further active participation in political affairs. Posterity may be said to have now begun for him, even while yet in the prime of powers abundant to earn for their possessor another fame, no less honorable than that which a life of patriotic public service has already made his. All truth may now be spoken of him, alike by friend and foe. To the latter, he is no longer an object of dread or of partisan animosity. Little is to be gained by vilifying him-no party purpose to be endangered by rendering him a fair justice of approval. To the former he is no longer either the actual or the prospective dispenser of the various forms of government patronage; they may condemn without fear of the loss of political power-they may praise without fear of the suspicion, from any quarter, of personal adulation or interested motive For ourselves, however much we might have preferred to postpone for some four or five years the enjoyment of this privilege of full freedom of speech, we are at least glad to be released from a restraint, of which we acknowledge the pressure to have been not unfelt; and while we regret as deeply as any the retired statesman's withdrawal from public life, we seize the occasion which it affords, to record

a portraiture of him which is drawn from opportunities of observation not enjoyed by most of our readers.

We have heard it said of Mr. Van Buren with striking frequency and earnestness, among those friends who, from nearest and longest personal intercourse, know him best, that, as a man and statesman, he is "too good and pure for the times ;" and while we take no such desponding view of "the times," yet, as a strong testimony and tribute to the character to which it is applied, it is neither untrue nor exaggerated. No President has ever filled that office—no statesman has ever occupied any of the high places of public service and honor under our Constitution-more upright in integrity, more true in patriotism, more sincere in philanthropic sympathy with the rights and interests of the masses, more selfdevoted in duty, more calmly, comprehensively wise in judgment. Without that impulsive genius, fitting and impelling to a political apostolate, which has stamped the impress of the mind of Jefferson so deeply on his country and his age, he combines a steady consistency of character with a practical sagacity in affairs both public and private, to a degree which the warmest eulogist does not claim for that glorious name. Whether he could or could not have performed the part in the formation of the Constitution on which rests Madison's chief title to immortality, can never be tested, nor need be speculated upon; but that he has shown himself a more unyielding disciple in a severer school of the Republican and State-Rights doctrine, cannot be denied by any of us who sigh over Madison's signature to a National Bank charter which he had himself but a brief period before vetoed. Monroe we pass over in the catalogue of the great Republican Presidents. He was a respectable gentleman of qualities rather negative than positive, who stood quietly by the helm while the vessel of the state glided smoothly over an unruffled sea, decently and decorously performing a regular routine of official duty, and that is all that is to be said about him. It is little worth while to disturb the dust of oblivion that is fast settling down over his name and period. Old Jackson affords few grounds on which any kind of comparison is possible. Men of different types and missions,

all that is to be said of them in this point of view, is that neither could have been the other; while the close and warm sympathy between themthe mutual confidence, admiration and affection which have characterized their relations together from a very early period of their acquaintance-make each the strongest witness possible to the goodness and greatness of the other. "That wise man and true patriot," was a frequent mode in which General Jackson used to characterize his younger, calmer, and cooler friend. With Mr. Van Buren it has long been, as it still is, a favorite topic, to dwell, with reverential love, on the extraordinary traits which have made the Iron Old Chief the wonderful man that history has already written him. We will not pursue further this train of observation. We have alluded to these great names to mark the class of men by the side of whom Mr. Van Buren is to be ranked and judged, and among whom, with variously balanced points of respective difference, he is entitled to occupy a place fully worthy of the noble confraternity of greatness and honorable fame.

Ne quid nimis-is a motto which would have been appropriate to sum up in brief Mr. Van Buren's character and life-nothing too much. He is a man of a most rare degree of completeness all round, and self-poised equilibrium which no ordinary circumstances could shakeshake-nor any of the extraordinary ones of which he has not been without experience. He is one of those few men whose moral centre of gravity appears truly at the centre, with all the parts regularly distributed about it in just symmetry and balance. Marked by no qualities running into that morbid or unnatural excess which is always sure to be at the expense of others essential to completeness, he is yet the furthest in the world removed from negativeness of character; he is on the contrary eminently positive—a man of decided force, movement, self-propelled and self-guided energy. He never indeed is seen to act by fits and starts; he is rarely in a hurry-never out of breath. Calmly strong in conscious rightable to wait, and willing to bide his time-content to acquiesce in the practical realities of the world as it is, and to make the best out of the actual men and things in it as he finds them—ready