as the Receiving Ship until 1872. April 7th of this year she arrived at the Charlestown (Massa chusetts) Yard, where she was completely rebuilt and converted into a steam vessel, being launched October 23d, 1874. During her forty-four years' career as a sailing-vessel, she was successively commanded by Master Commandants John Gallagher, Beverly Kennon, George Budd, Thomas T. Webb, W. A. Spencer, Thomas T. Webb (second time); Lieutenant L. M. Sowell, and Master-Commandant Thomas Crabb; Commanders John Gwinn, Uriah P. Levy, William Ramsey, William J. McCluney, J. S. Chauncey, W. H. Gardner, John Pope, Arthur Sinclair, Samuel Phillips Lee, F. S. Haggerty, Clark H. Wells, M. B. Woolsey, E. C. Bowers, Jonathan Young, Edward C. Grafton, W. W. Low, O. F. Stanton, S. Livingston Breese. The following is a list of the officers attached to the Yard during the latter part of Commodore Bainbridge's term, viz.: Master-Commandant, William B. Finch; Lieutenant, John Gwinn; Purser, Thomas Breese; Chaplain, John W. Grier; Midshipmen, Wyllys Silliman and John Weems; Sailing-Master, William Knight; Gunner, Asa Curtis ; Sailmaker, James Ferguson. The schooner Sea Gull' (galliot) was then the Receiving Ship, and in charge of Lieutenant John H. Aulick. The marine officers were, Captain Samuel Miller and Lieutenants Williams, Lee, and McLean. ALGERNON SIDNEY. ALGERNON SIDNEY. By S. P. ScOTT. In the year 1622, at the Castle of Penshurst, Kent, was born Algernon Sidney, a statesman whose political influence, although great and renowned, has been surpassed by the sympathy excited by his writings, and by the example of his melancholy death. His name has long been the synonym of patriotic virtue, and the prominent part he bore as one of the founders of the English Constitution-the intimate of Marten, the fellowlaborer of Vane, the friend of Bradshaw, the daring opponent of Cromwell-has secured for him an exalted and well-merited rank among the advo cates of toleration and the champions of human freedom. The family of Sidney is as old as the Plantagenets. Its founder, Sir William Sidney, came from Anjou with Henry II., as grand chamberlain, and his descendants were early distinguished by their connection with the noble house of Leicester. Sir Philip Sidney, whom Good Queen Bess was accustomed to call "her jewel," and whose varied accomplishments and chivalrous bearing have formed the theme of so many poets and biographers, was the ancestor of Algernon. The Earl of Leicester, the father of the latter, had acquired reputation in the councils of Charles I., and had been entrusted with important missions to foreign courts; all of which he had performed with credit to himself and with advantage to his country. Algernon's mother was Dorothy, eldest daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, and the youthful flame of Waller, immortalized under the name of Sacharissa. The Marquis of Halifax-the most brilliant orator and politician of his day, and Lord Privy Seal under Charles II.-and the adroit but unprincipled Earl of Sunderland, Secretary of State in the same cabinet, were the nephews of of Sidney. Thus allied by birth and marriage to the most honorable families of the realm, Sidney was brought up amid the stirring memories of the old medieval times. The venerable Hall of Pens 1 The Sea Gull was a purchased vessel, built in 1823, and foundered at sea May 1st, 1839. hurst dates back to before the Conquest, and from a rude structure of wood defended by palisades, a spacious castle, with lofty walls and frowning battlements, "Arose with airy turrets crown'd, Buttress, and rampires circling round, which had often sheltered the spoils of marauding barons, and bidden defiance to the threats of hos tile neighbors. At three different periods of its history it had been forfeited to the crown for the treason of its owners. The favorite residence of the Duke of Bedford, uncle of Henry VI., and long the seat of the Dukes of Buckingham, it fell into the hands of the Sidney family during the reign of Edward VI. Here, under the tuition of his father, an accomplished scholar and linguist, and a man of liberal opinions, Sidney passed the days of his childhood. At the age of ten years he was taken to Paris to be educated, the Earl of Leiceister, lately appointed Minister at Versailles, having concluded to give his son the advantages of the French universities, which stood higher in the literary world than those of Oxford and Cambridge. The learned and polite society of the French capital at that time exhibited the strange anomaly of a certain degree of liberty of speech and thought, existing under an absolute monarchy. That class of citizens, among whom persons of scholastic acquirements were to be found, by the perusal of the classics and the incessant study of the political systems of the ancients, had become enthusiastic admirers of the republics of Greece and Rome. They contrasted the stern integrity of Cato with the duplicity of Richelieu, and the devotion of Aristides with the venal maxims of Louis; while the theoretical and exaggerated notions of freedom which have come down to us from the commonwealths of antiquity were ind gnantly compared with the arbitrary edicts and crushing despotism of the Bourbon court. With an indulgence which afterwards proved so fata to royalty, great latitude of discussion was lowed in all literary assemblies, so long as the prerogatives of the crown were not openly assailed or questioned. In the universal eagerness for speculative liberty, its foundations of religious belief were attacked and undermined. Atheism, in the plausible and alluring garb of philosophy, be came the prevailing fashion. Everything of classic origin was lauded to the skies as perfect, all of modern institution was subjected to jealocs and unfair criticism. The mists of two thousand years had concealed from sight the selfish ambition, the cruelty, and the mercenary vices of those heroes whom the French philosophers had made the idols of their political worship. In their undiscerning eulogy of the Ancients, they forgot that in Athens the slaves outnum bered the freemen two to one; that patriotism and true renown were there rewarded by ostracism, and that an infuriated and envious populace had driven Themistocles into exile, de prived Miltiades of his possessions, and sent the best and noblest of the pagan philosophers to a dishonored grave. They overlooked the fact that the most ruinous and implacable of all despotisms is that of a pure democracy, where the responsibility is divided among all, and rests upon none. Blind to the injustice and the palpable defects of the polity of the olden times, they regarded their models only as the personification of abstract virtues; and, with this exalted and erroneous view of their character, they bowed down before them, held themselves aloof from the luxurious and dissolute festivities of the court, framed in the privacy of the closet ideal constitutions of Utopian republics, and murmured only too justly at the remorseless energy of a government which enforced its decrees by lettres de cachet, the bayonet, and the bastile. mined to use their advantage to the utmost. Duped by the plausible conduct and hypocrisy of Cromwell, Vane, Sidney, and other influential members of their party had unwittingly lent their aid to CHARLES I. In this school, and under these instructors, the creed of Algernon Sidney was formed. His plastic mind there received with ease those impressions and imbibed those principles which subsequently exerted so marked an influence upon his public the establishment of a military despotism, and career. When his education was completed, along discovered their fatal mistake too late to apply a with his elder brother Philip he accompanied his remedy. The aspirations of the Independents father to Ireland, where Leicester had been made could not be gratified so long as the king lived, Lord Lieutenant in place of Stafford; and though and it was decided to put him to death. The Presbut nineteen years old, a captain in his father's byterians, not so violent, favored deposition, and regiment, he displayed, in the battles with the perpetual banishment; while a third party wished Irish, all the qualities of a brave and vigilant com- to bring Charles to trial, and then dispose of his mander. Returning to England, the brothers person in such a way as should seem advisable were looked upon with distrust by both parties, to a majority of the nation. Sidney was named and falling into the hands of the Parliamentary one of the judges of the High Court of Justice, but forces, were carried prisoners to London. At attended only twice to protest against the course once giving in his adherence to Parliament, Alger- of Cromwell, and deny the jurisdiction of the non Sidney, previously advanced to the rank of a commission. During the sessions in Westminster colonel, behaved with great gallantry, and was Hall he never appeared, but while condemning dangerously wounded at the battle of Marston the high-handed proceedings which resulted in Moor, where the power of Charles was forever the execution of the king, he cordially endorsed broken and his army annihilated. His military the judgment of the court as consonant to the experience terminated with this engagement, his principles of justice, and the abstract right of wounds disabling him from further service. every subject to investigate and punish the crimes and misdeeds of his sovereign. As soon as the sentence had been carried out, Sidney resumed his place in the house of Commons, whence he was speedily promoted to the Council of State. A violent dispute arose between himself and Crom. well, when the oath of office which commended the trial of the king and the overthrow of the throne, was tendered; Sidney denouncing it as "a test that would prove a snare to many an honest man, but every knave would slip through In 1645 he was appointed Governor of Chichester, and soon after was elected member of Parliament for Cardiff. The contest for power between the rival factions was now fast approach ing its climax. The Independents though in a minority, yet in adroitness, political tact and unprincipled boldness, were far superior to their By the passage of the Self-denying Ordinance and the reorganization of the army, they had obtained the mastery, and were deter N ་་ Is seat. nais place urned out public life, were, during e assiduously ture. Again ter the abdic in the new In the reign etween Sweden age was Copenhagen, the government under which Sidney held his commission was swept out of existence. e encroach- The unanimous voice of the British nation had pronounced for monarchy, and Charles II. had ascended the throne, amid the enthusiastic shouts of all parties disgusted no less by faction and civil war, than by the rigor of a military despotismwhich retaining all of the odious vices of arbitrary government, without the name-had exercised a power more incompatible with the liberty of the subject, than had ever been developed under the prerogative of the haughty Tudors, aided by a servile legislature, and an overawed and cringing people. Living for a few months at Stockholm, Sidney decided to go to Hamburg, and thence to Italy. While virtually pardoned by the Act of Indemnity, he was too well acquainted with the vindictiveness of the being to place faith in his clemency, and recent events in England had confirmed in his opinion. Six of the regicides had perished upon the scaffold. Vane, eir respective etic, and media..or both of the 2 Roschild which had been per...and the invincible the Conqueror of sands of the Danish , and aimed at the ܂ Annoved by these sance, and Holland Sate; and the Parliathe former offer of Commissioners of whom gerate, and check the Somineering spirit of o opposition from his w the opportunity of eral monarch and of mphant royality. The s of the English, soon Need their influence against e Puia and Poland eagerly to wrest from Sweden her to, multiplied difficulties, schemes even in the council by these vexations, the d the principal labors of the wwa engrossed by Sidney, and in the mission, though he ennies a mind as inflexible as his red and delayed by the plots nobles who threw every obstacle an amicable settlement, yet he intricate affair to a successful with all the address of a practiced ... OLIVER CROMWELL. his valued friend, convicted after an unfair trial The and the bones of Cromwell aud Bradshaw were gibbeted in chains at Tyburn. Aware of the heated state of the public mind, and dreading the effect of the reaction which seemed so universal, Sidney determined never to revisit his native land. The animosity of the court was displayed upon every occasion possible, and as he had spurned the efforts of Monk to reconcile him to the new order of things he could not hope to live safely in England even in obscurity. Passing through Holland and Germany he went to Rome, then in 1663 returning to Brussels he attempted to gain the consent of De Witt to stir up a war between England and the United Provinces. This scheme failing, he posted to France, and intrigued with Louis for the same object promising a rebellion in Ireland, and the submersion of the British throne for a consideration of one hundred thousand crowns. Disappointed again, he remained in Paris in intimate relations with the cabinet of Louis, and the course he pursued while there served too well to confirm the suspicions afterwards raised that he had been a pensioner of France. The venerable Earl of Leicester, now in his eighty-third year, oppressed with many infirmities and aware of his approaching end, wished once more to embrace his absent son, and give him his final blessing. Through the influence of Savile, Minister at Paris, and of Sunderland, permission was obtained for Sidney's return. Seventeen years before, the head of a splendid embassy, the representative of a powerful government, rejoicing in the restoration of the rights and privileges of parliament, hopeful of the speedy success of those political dreams he had long nursed with jealous care, he had sailed with the combined fleets of three mighty nations, to dictate peace upon the shores of the Northern Ocean. Now he came back with the reluctant consent of that monarch whose father he had dethroned, and whose title he had questioned, after being followed by royalist assassins through half the countries of Europe, broken in health and purse, cynical in feeling, but inspired with that indomitable resolution which had sustained him through all his reverses, and strengthened anew his determination "to endure in silence what fortune soever remained unto him." The Popish Plot, and the alleged designs of the Jesuits, were then producing tremendous excitement throughout the kingdom. The shrewd councillors of Charles, though aware of the falsity VOL. VI.-22 of the pretended conspiracy, were unable to stem the tide of popular prejudices which had been raised by the perjuries of Oates, and the villiany of the unprincipled Bedloe. Compelled to yield to the clamor of the mob, the court, to save themselves sent to prison and the scaffold scores of persons innocent of all crime, save attachment to the Catholic faith. In the authenticity of the Popish Plot, Sidney was a firm and sincere believer. That the ignorant populace inflamed by party spirit, and the exhortations of a fanatical clergy, should have given credence to this barefaced fraud is not surprising; but that a statesmen of Sidney's discernments, a profound scholar, an acute observer of men, should have been imposed upon by the fabrication of Oates, exhibits one of the strangest examples of delusion in the history of the human mind. Accustomed to the turmoil of politics, the impatient spirit of Sidney could not endure the quiet retirement of a private station. He was twice a candidate for Parliament, and was defeated both times by the intrigues of the court, which still recognized in him a dangerous enemy. It was during this canvass that he formed the acquaintance of William Penn, a connection which soon ripened into a deep and lasting friendship. Before Penn started for America, he showed to Sidney the constitution he had framed for the administration of his new colony. After perusing it, Sidney revised the whole instrument, and incorporated therein many of his own peculiar opinions, which were warmly approved by his friend. The original constitution of Pennsylvania therefore-from which have been derived many |