ANNALS OF QUODLIBET.

EDITED BY

THE AUTHOR OF "SWALLOW BARN," ETC. ETC.

QUODLIBET:

CONTAINING

SOME ANNALS THEREOF,

WITH AN

AUTHENTIC ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BOROUGH,
AND THE SAYINGS AND DOINGS OF SUNDRY OF THE TOWNSPEOPLE;
INTERSPERSED WITH SKETCHES OF THE MOST
REMARKABLE AND DISTINGUISHED CHARACTERS
OF THAT PLACE AND ITS VICINITY.

BY SOLOMON SECONDTHOUGHTS,
SCHOOLMASTER,

FROM ORIGINAL MSS. INDITED BY HIM, AND NOW MADE PUBLIC AT THE REQUEST AND
UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE GREAT NEW-LIGHT DEMOCRATIC
CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF QUODLIBET.

Maxima de nihilo nascitur historia.—Propertius.

SECOND EDITION.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,
1860.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR.

These annals were first published in 1840. They reappear after an interval of twenty years. In that interval the old questions which inflamed the zeal and sharpened the wit of parties have totally disappeared from the political field: the parties themselves have fermented into new compounds, and lost all cognizable identity. Old warriors, who dealt mortal blows on each other's sconce, have sunk to sleep in the same truckle bed, and have waked up in mutual surprise to find themselves in each other's arms, with a new flag above them, and new and unaccustomed voices giving the word of command.

The youth who have grown up to manhood in the mean time, and have come to be conspicuous in the conduct of public affairs, compose a distinct generation, as unconscious of the events, the interests, and sentiments of twenty years ago as of those of remote antiquity. These not only reject the traditions and teachings of the past, but repudiate and ignore the whole scheme of social and political opinion of the men who have gone before them, disdaining to adopt their maxims of government, their policy, their forbearance, their toleration, or their affections. They inaugurate a new era of new principles, new purposes, new powers, new morals, and, alas! of new hatreds.

May it not serve a good turn toward arresting this torrent of innovation, to present to the leisure meditation of those who are embarking upon its stream, a few memorials of a bygone day, quite as distinguished as the present for the intensity of its political ardors and the absurdity of its excesses, but, fortunately, more harmless and amiable in its temper? Is it not worth while to attempt, by these playful sketches of the past, to lure the angry combatants into a smile, and, by showing them the grotesque retribution which history inflicts upon distempered parties after a few decades of oblivion, to beguile them into some consideration of the predicament in which they may leave their own renown? May not all sober-minded lovers of their country contemplate with some profit the morale of a picture—even as light and extravagant as this—which represents the engrossments of parties who fancied that the destinies of a great nation hung upon the plots and counterplots of their busy ferment,—which engrossments, with all their concomitant gravities and glorifications, twenty years have shriveled into the dimensions of a pleasant farce—a little stage imbroglio of comic conceits and fussy nothings?

That intrepidity of absurdity which no responsible individual would dare to countenance in his own conduct, and which is only possible to organized bodies propelled by the ardor of party enthusiasm, is a fact in human action worth the study of the philosopher. By some unexplored tidal law, parties would seem to move through successive ebb and flow toward a final culmination of mischievous extreme, each refluent wave returning with heavier mass, until the accumulated weight of madness and folly overtopples, breaks, and dissolves in noisy foam. As we have a computed cycle of a money-crisis, the known result of an increasing and rapid prosperity ill used, so also we have the regularly recurring political crisis, the result of increasing party-power abused by rash and insolent presumption upon its strength.

This century has run out its three periods of twenty years. The first ended in the total absorption of all differences of opinion, bringing a stagnant calm upon the waters of ancient strife. The second culminated in a revolution that shook a great party out of its seat;—a revolution which these annals were designed to illustrate. The third period has wheeled through its course, to work another downfall and another revolution more notable and significant than either that have gone before. The fourth, let us hope, may find a nation restored to reason;—a great united Republic, tried and purified by the experience of dangers incurred and surmounted, and by an awakened patriotism successfully asserting the predominance of the good sense and virtue of the people over the factious spirit that ministers to personal ambition, and the vanity that seeks renown in innovations upon either the principles in which the Union was formed, or the sentiment by which it is to be preserved.

But these reflections are tending toward a graver subject than it would be becoming to discuss here. So, I leave them for some more appropriate occasion. If I have any reason to fear the annals of Quodlibet may find no favor with the emerging generation, I can make sure of another class of readers to whom I look with a staunch and unfaltering trust;—that goodly host of ripe and considerate citizens, the survivors of 1840—that salt of the earth, who live on the past, and reckon old memories to be better than a fresh and damp morning journal. To you, old friends, bald on the crown, gray and feathery about the temples, with jovial glance of the eye, showing a heart made kind by trials, and who love your country with an affection that grows out of the straits in which you have seen her, and the faith you have that Providence has helped her through them, and will help her through many more: to you, seasoned and made jocund by time, and who, both as supporters and antagonists, have run through the career of passion and delusion, and outlived the wrath, the cunning, and the falsehood, the grandiloquent fervor and exaggerated importance of the old political quarrels; to you I dedicate this new edition of this book and consign it to your protection, with the affectionate trust of a fellow-soldier, (whether as comrade or opponent,—as kindly in one character as the other,) in the whilom war of bloodless campaigns, in which for years we were mutually engaged.

The astute reader of these annals, if he but truly analyze their philosophy, may obtain a revelation more or less intelligible of what is acting on the stage to-day, and even arrive at some data by which he may cast a horoscope of the time to come. History is constantly reproducing itself. Events have different dates, and run in different names; but motives, human action and passion, are the same, and bring to light the same categories of thought and opinion. That which has been, is, and will be again,