This is a secluded and delicious bit of nature, hidden amid rocks and woods, on the shore of the Hudson, but possessing a refinement and an elegance in its wildness which would almost give one the idea that it was an object of beauty in some royal park. One of the most secret streams that feed this finest of our rivers, finds its way down through a winding and almost trackless channel; and after fretting over rocks, and loitering in dark and limpid pools for several miles, suddenly bursts out over a precipice of fifty feet, and fills with its clear waters the sheltered basin seen in the drawing. Immense trees overhang it on every side, and follow the stream still on in its course; and, in the depth of summer, the foaming current scarcely catches a ray of the sun from its source to its outlet. The floor of the basin below the Fall is pebbly, the water is clear and cool, the spot secluded, and, in all respects, Nature has formed it for a bath. A fair and famous lady, residing a summer or two since at West Point, was its first known Musidora, and the limpid and bright basin is already called after her name.

A large party visiting at a hospitable house, where the artist and his travelling companion were entertained during the heat of the last summer, proposed to accompany him on his visit to the Indian Fall.

In looking down on this lovely scene, made memorable by savage barbarity, and famous by the poet's wand of enchantment, it is natural to indulge in resentful feelings towards the sanguinary race whose atrocities make up its page in story. It is a pity, however, that they too, had not a poet and a partial chronicler. Leaving entirely out of view the ten thousand wrongs done by the white man to the Indian, in the corruption, robbery, and rapid extinction of his race, there are personal atrocities, on our own records, exercised toward that fated people, which, in impartial history hereafter, will redeem them from all charge except that of irresistible retaliation. The brief story of the famous Cornstalk, Sachem of the Shawanees, and King of the Northern Confederacy, is sermon enough on this text.

The north-western corner of Virginia, and that part of Pennsylvania contiguous, on the south, to the valley represented in the drawing, was the scene of some of the bloodiest events of Indian warfare. Distinguished over all the other red men of this region, was Cornstalk. He was equally a terror to the men of his own tribe, (whom he did not hesitate to hew down with his tomahawk if they showed any cowardice in fight,) and a formidable opponent to our troops, from his military talents and personal daring.

The particulars of what is called the Willey Tragedy are well known to all readers of newspapers. This family lived in the Notch of the White Mountains, under the western range, and consisted of nine persons. They had retired at night, when a very unusual noise in the mountains roused them from their beds, and, in terror at its increasing thunders, they unfortunately abandoned the house, and sought refuge in flight. A vast mass of earth and rocks, disengaged from the precipices above them, suddenly rushed down the side of the mountain, and sweeping every thing before it, divided in the rear of the house, reunited again, leaving it unharmed, and thundered down to the valley, overwhelming the fugitive family in its career. The manuscript journal of a friend, who had made two excursions to the spot, gives us an account of its present aspect.

“In a short time we came to the well-known house of the Willey family, which of course we paused to examine. Nothing can be conceived more lonely than this wild place. The mountains tower on both sides of the valley to the height of four or five hundred feet, with deep channels worn into their sides by the winter torrents; and in many places the rocks are left bare for acres by the slides of avalanches that have rushed into the valley.[…]

The mountains on the shore of this exquisite lake consist of two great ranges, bordering it from north to south. The western range passes westward of the north-west bay, at the head of which a vast spar, shooting towards the south-east, forms the whole of the peninsula between that bay and the lake. Both these ranges alternately approach the lake, so as to constitute a considerable part of its shores, and recede from it again to the distance sometimes of two or three miles.

The summits of these mountains are of almost every figure, from the arch, to the bold, bluff, and sharp cone. In some instances, the loftier ones are bald, solemn, and forbidding; in others, they are clothed and crowned with verdure. It is the peculiarity of Lake George, that, while all the world agrees to speak only of its loveliness, it is surrounded by features of the highest grandeur and sublimity. The Black Mountain is one of these; and there is every variety of chasm, crag, promontory, and peak, which a painter would require for the noblest composition of mountain scenery. The atmospheric changes here, too, are almost always violent; and storms are so frequent, that there is scarce a traveller to Lake George in the summer who has not seen it in a thunder-storm.

By the contents of a MS. found in the Library of Jesus College this title was suggested, under which we proceed to offer details principally drawn thence respecting certain words which are peculiar to the University and which involve points of its system, or customs at present in force or dropped. And we hope that this information may possess interest and value for many who have looked on some of these points as unmeaning, and passed through the practice depending upon them with the impatience that would naturally be excited by restraints whose purpose was not seen and supposed therefore to have no existence.

First shall be introduced a set of terms appropriated to persons. In the account of these it will be seen how Offices, and the powers and privileges attached to them, grow up gradually out of necessity and from wants felt by the body; and are modified by altering improving enlarging and consolidating, in the lapse of time, by the effect of custom, by the result of carelessness or the effort of precaution.

Rector— the ancient title of the Governor of the University. The name is still borne by the chief officer in Foreign Universities. We are also familiar with the term in application to the Universities of Scotland. Hence in the vacancy of the Vice-Chancellorship (which is during one day in every year) the Proctors are sometimes mentioned with the title Rectores.

The house, whose front forms the prominent object in the drawing, is one of several claimants to the title of ‘oldest in the Town’. It is neighbour to the Wrestler's Inn, in which it is said Jeremy Taylor was born, and is part of the Petty Cury. This front soon arrests the attention of the passenger who takes any interest in architecture. Unlike its neighbour, which was the latest built in this style (1634), and has fallen an earlier victim to the modern taste for plain brick and mortar, this has preserved its ornamental character, showing the rose, the emblem of the reigning family, within flowing lines, arranged in borders that divide the gables; and made gay with the once much admired expedient of paint. If the observer penetrate beyond the surface, in the Inn Yard he might imagine himself living in another age of building. Here he beholds portions advanced like oriels, and rising aloft, having the whole breadth of each face occupied by window, and terminating in pediments which are either surmounted with minarets of wood carved in some fantastic shape, or support, at the vertical angle, pendants of similar character. On another side a gallery runs between the basement and upper story into which all the rooms of this floor open. The front is intersected by beams, and presents a surface of plaister worked in a hexagonal pattern.

The Private Collections offer considerable advantages to the Historical enquirer, to alleviate the toil with which their extent threatens him. He will find in them copious transcripts of original documents made with a fidelity that deserves implicit reliance, though it fail to satisfy curiosity; and with a perspicuity most acceptable in exchange for the cramped and faded characters of antiquity.

For Hare's MSS. I cannot do better than present a ready drawn account.

“Robert Hare was an Esquire of good worship and wealth, and a great lover and preserver of Antiquities, says Fuller, Hist. Univ. p. 15.

He was the Son of Sir Nicholas Hare, quondam Rotulorum Cancellariæ magistri, as he tells us in the preface to his Collections, which work he says he undertook at the request of Dr. Capcott then Vice-Chancellor, and finished A.D. 1587.

We are told in the first form of Public Commemoration of Benefactors made A.D. 1639, Dr. Cosin Vice-Chancellor, that — Principum Chartas Indulta et Privilegia quæcunque vel Rempublicam, Academiam vel Municipium Cantabrigiæ spectabant, ingenti sumptu et industria collegit; quæ cum quatuor omnia libris digessisset, et eleganter manu descripta triplicasset, eorum primarium Exemplar in membranis exaratum inter Archiva Academiæ, alterum apud Procancellarium, tertium vero apud Registrarium asservari voluit.

There are now four Volumes with the Vice-Chancellor; I am told there was a fifth, which was lost by the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. James, in 1684.

Of all the smaller Colleges, with the exception perhaps of Christ's, which stands preeminent through Milton's undying page, Pembroke College may be said to boast the longest and brightest list of names consecrated to fame. In the Hall is an extremely elegant and correct bust of the great Pitt, lately presented to the nursing mother of his genius by the munificence of the Earl of Farnborough. By the by, if Christ's College is really proud of being styled the College of Milton, should it not blush that two centuries have passed away while no more is done by them to his honour than if the copy right of Paradise Lost were still bandied about amongst the booksellers as a hazardous purchase at less than twenty pounds! It is true they show his mulberry tree in their garden, and have even gone so far as to case its time-worn trunk in lead, and prop its falling branches with posts of deal, ‘inutile lignum’;— but where is the statue emulative of Roubillac's Newton; where the bust which might be executed by a Chantrey after the original cast in plaster which they possess in the Library of his College? But to return to Pembroke College: passing through the Hall, the stranger enters the Combination Room, and is gratified by a collection of portraits of more than average execution as specimens of painting, and presenting him with the features of names endeared to every lover of the Muses.

Of the river scenery of America, the Hudson, at West Point, is doubtless the boldest and most beautiful. This powerful river writhes through the highlands in abrupt curves, reminding one, when the tide runs strongly down, of Laocoon in the enlacing folds of the serpent. The different spurs of mountain ranges which meet here, abut upon the river in bold precipices from five to fifteen hundred feet from the water's edge; the foliage hangs to them, from base to summit, with the tenacity and bright verdure of moss; and the stream below, deprived of the slant lights which brighten its depths elsewhere, flows on with a sombre and dark green shadow in its bosom, as if frowning at the narrow gorge into which its broad-breasted waters are driven.

Back from the bluff of West Point extends a natural platform of near half a mile square, high, level, and beautifully amphitheatred with wood and rock. This is the site of the Military Academy, and a splendid natural parade. When the tents of the summer camp are shining on the field—the flag, with its bloodbright stripes, waving against the foliage of the hills—the trumpet echoing from bluff to bluff, and the compact batallion cutting its trice-line across the greensward— there are few more fairy spots in this working-day world.

On the extreme edge of the summit, overlooking the river, stands a marble shaft, pointing like a bright finger to glory, the tomb of the soldier and patriot Kosciusko.

Janus Grüter was born at Antwerp, A. D. 1563: and after he had passed some time at Norwich under the tuition of Dr. Matthias, in the year 1577, he was admitted to our college and made his first essay of the University studies with us on the eleventh of June in that year. In writing of himself, he says in his preface to his large Anthology, “that, both by his mother and his grandmother, he was an Englishman and always was called such; and that he had lived and grown up to manhood in that island; that his studies had been either at Norwich or Cambridge, from his fourth to his nineteeth year.” The remainder of his youth he passed at Leyden in Holland; Heydelberg saw him grow old: at length, the Austrian arms sounding on all sides, Grüter to avoid the storms of civil war meditated a return to England, as having been educated in England, and therefore he might with propriety look to her care and guardianship as of a mother, and so much the more, because he had lived arrived at manhood and completed his education in that well-favoured island without leaving it. On the capture and sacking of Heydelberg he was stripped of all he possessed, and not long after he made choice of his last home in this life at Britta with his son in law; where bowed to the commands of fate most illustrious Grüter.

William Butler was born at Ipswich in the year 1533. He was of Clare Hall, of which College he became a Fellow. He commenced practice as a physician in Cambridge, and was commonly known by the title of Doctor Butler, although he never proceeded to the degree of M. D. Before his time the practice of medical science in England was in a very rude and imperfect state; he, however, seems to have effected great improvements in it, and was reputed one of the first physicians of the age.

He is said to have been the first Englishman who brought in the use of Galenical and Chemical physic, to the great benefit of his patients. His sagacity was remarkable in discovering the existence of those symptoms of approaching death which are developed in the countenance, and are known to physicians by the term facies Hippocratica. It was this quickness that enabled him when called in to attend Prince Henry, son of James I. to perceive at the first glance the hopelessness of the case; and under this impression he got out of the way that he might not have to prescribe for him.

As a proof of his great reputation in practice, may be mentioned what is related of Sir Thomas Bodley, when “he was come to his last cast,” that “having run over all the best Physitians of London he was still disheartened at not being able to get Butler of Cambridge to come to him, not so much as to speak with him; for he says, words cannot cure him and he can do nothing else to him.