SAMUEL SLATER.

THERE is no individual deserving of a more honored perpetuity in American annals than the one named above. True, he had no far back ancestry, as common in the land of his birth, to nourish a silly pride. Heraldry had no laurels to encircle him. The dazzling splendors of a court had never cast their luster upon him. Nor is it known that he could cast an eye of complacency on any one of his own blood who had been particularly distinguished in the army, the navy, or the church. No, that blood had descended through successive generations-not by inundating floods and over lofty precipices, to arrest the gaze and call forth the accla mation of impulsive multitudes; but in limpid streams, noiseless and gentle, through the deep mountain-passes, till the alluvial plains below were made rich and verdant by their fertilizing agency. His father was a respectable yeoman of Belper, Derbyshire county, in a central part of England. The yeomanry of that country form a distinct class, farming their own lands, ordinarily possessing wealth competent for their own necessities; being a desirable. mediocrity in society, equally removed, on the one hand, from all in scouted and unmitigated poverty that is degrading and paralyzing; and, on the other hand, from sudden overgrown riches and unnatural rank in social position.

Verily, it is no easy matter to write the biography of such a man as Samuel Slater; we mean, to write one that will be generally read in a community like ours. It is not denied that we are a business kind of people, proverbially philosophical and shrewd in all matters connected with the ac

quisition of property; yet, few indeed think of reading the life of a business man. If urged to do it, the response will be interrogatories like the following:-What has he done that is memorable or calculated to interest mankind? Has he made any brilliant discoveries in science? Has the telescope opened to his enraptured vision hitherto undiscovered planets? Have the laboratories of the chemist enabled him to spread upon some broad and distinct panorama new analyses and combinations, and, as it were, new principles in the government of physical nature? Or, has he fought the battles of his country and clothed himself with martial glory? We can not answer in the affirmative. We admit, that usually in the life of a business man there is not to be expected much incident to arrest the attention of the sleepy and the dull. If he has acquired great wealth; if at home he gives constant employment and consequent subsistence, year after year, to hundreds or to thousands of mechanics and laborers; if, too, the virtuous poor are furnished by him with comfortable habitations, at rates the most reduced and advantageous; and, if abroad the canvas of his ships whiten every sea, and the merry notes of his gallant tars enliven every port in the known world; nevertheless his career has been comparatively uniform and monotonous-nothing in it stirring and dazzling, unless it be the grand result, the acquisition of a princely fortune. If now and then a rich cargo, amid the howling tempest and the upturned elements, sink into the ocean's deep abyss; or if a conflagration in the dark hour of midnight sweep away whole blocks of houses and stores; these are deemed commonplace occurrences, scarcely deserving recollection. Whatever public sympathy may exist tends to another point. The tenants in being thus frightfully driven from their habitations by the flames bursting in upon them; and the mariners also in struggling for life, when shipwreck deprives them of food and all rational