London Correspondence.—We have a long and entertaining epistle from our London correspondent, from which we regret that we can extract only a few desultory passages. Speaking of autographs, he says: 'I am collecting a famous lot of them. Beside all sent home, I have Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, Campbell, Joanna Baillie, Scott, Lady Blessington, Sir E. Brydges, Lord Durham, Brougham, Wellington, James Montgomery, William Godwin, Mrs. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Galt, James Hogg, Lockhart, Jeffrey, S. C. Hall, etc. Some of these, let me tell you, cost money. I gave seven dollars and fifty cents for a letter from Sir Walter Scott to Thomas Hood. Most of these are long and interesting letters, and very characteristic. It's a mania, this autograph business, with those who engage in it; and they are not a few, in England. A copy of Montaigne's Essays, with 'William Shakspere' written in it, was sold recently for one hundred pounds. If it had been proved genuine, it would have brought three or four times as much. Five hundred dollars for a name! 'What's in a name?' Upward of considerable. ** I attended a meeting of the famous 'Royal Society' last week; the same that Sir Isaac Newton and the Duke of Sussex presided over. What think you of that? I am not yet proposed as a member, though the ballot-box came to me to vote some body else in; for I was interspersed among all the F.R.S.'s. After meeting, they invited me to tea, in the library. It was most philosophical and highly scientific tea. ** Bulwer's 'Richelieu' is splendidly brought out at Covent Garden, and Macready makes the most of the old Cardinal; but the more judicious critics are far from stamping Bulwer as the great dramatist, after all. 'The Lady of Lyons' wears well, and is often repeated. It is a rich treat to see Macready as 'Melnotte.' The most successful actors, however, by all odds, are Jim Crow and Van Amburgh. The latter has made a little fortune. Only think of a menagerie man giving a dinner to the friends of the drama in Drury Lane Theatre! O tempora! O mores! E Pluribus Unum, and Yankee Doodle! Lord Brougham goes to see Jim Crow, but has not been seen at Covent Garden. And this is a fair specimen. Giants, monkeys, Bayaderes, and 'niggers,' are the order of the day. No, I forget. To-day the order is, 'War with America!' displayed on huge placards, by a posse of twenty or four-and-twenty men, 'all in a row,' up and down the Strand. Heaven preserve us! Vic. will take me captive! Think of me, therefore, as a prisoner of war in the galleys. Do me the favor to 'captivate a Britisher' as an offset!'
Christopher Marshall's Remembrancer.—Mr. Christopher Marshall, whose ancestors came to America with William Penn, resided in Philadelphia, from the age of thirty until his death, in 1797, at the age of eighty-seven. He was a member of the Society of Friends, but his devotion to the liberties and rights of the colonies procured his excommunication from a body which denied the lawfulness of defensive warfare. In his sixty-fourth year, he commenced a diary ; and from five volumes of this 'Remembrancer,' covering the period from January, 1774, to September, 1781, the compiler of the work under notice, Mr. William Duane, Jr., has selected many new facts in relation to public affairs, and the progress of the revolution, with so much of the private history of the author as throws light upon the manners of the times.
It is pleasant to trace the brief and fresh records of such eventful occurrences as the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Washington's passage of the Delaware, the burning, by the provincials, of the light-house at the entrance of Boston harbor, and the pulling up of the piles that were the marks for the shipping, etc. Here, an account from Boston informs us, that 'Burgoyne is in a deep, settled melancholy, walking the streets frequently, with his arms folded across his breast, and talking to himself;' and again, that 'General Gage is often out of his head, and that he and Admiral Greaves have publicly quarrelled, so that he told Gage it was a cowardly action to burn Charlestown.' Then we have accounts of certain public rebukes, administered by the committee of safety at Phila-