February 13-16.--Floods did great damage in Boston and other places in Eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
January 16.--Death of Henry W. Hudson, LL.D., at Cambridge, from exhaustion following a slight surgical operation. He was one of the most noted Shaksperian scholars in the world. He was born in Cornwall, Vt., January 28, 1814. His early life was, like that of so many other Green Mountain boys, one of poverty, struggle for a livelihood and an education, till finally he had gained his much-coveted collegiate training, and began life as a teacher in the South. He became interested in Shakspere, studying the plays with only the slight aids then within his reach. Almost immediately he fell to work upon his critical analysis of the dramatist, which he delivered in the form of lectures at Huntsville, and afterwards at Mobile and Cincinnati. In the fall of 1844 he came to Boston, and was constantly engaged in delivering his Shaksperian lectures, during the following winter, in Boston and the chief neighboring cities. The succeeding year they were repeated in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. George S. Hillard, Theodore Parker, Dr. Chandler Robbins, and Mr. Emerson became deeply interested in him. His lectures were first published in 1848, and were dedicated to Richard H. Dana. Mr. Hudson was admitted to the diaconate in the Episcopal Church by Bishop Whittingham, in Trinity Church, New York, in 1849. He was still more or less engaged in literary pursuits, and in 1852 became and continued for nearly three years the editor of the _Churchman_, a weekly religious journal then published in New York. Subsequently he originated the _Church Monthly_, which he edited a year or two. His only parochial charge has been that of St. Michael's, Litchfield, Conn., assumed in 1858 and retained until 1860. It was in 1851 that his first edition of "Shakspere's Plays" appeared, in eleven volumes, after the form and style of the Chiswick edition of 1826. In 1852 he married Miss Emily S. Bright, daughter of Henry Bright, of Northampton. In 1862 he became chaplain in the New York Volunteer Engineers. From 1865 Mr. Hudson lived principally in Cambridge, frequently officiating in parish churches on Sundays, but principally devoting himself to the teaching of Shakspere and other English authors, in Boston and the immediate neighborhood. He was for a long time a lecturer on English literature at the Boston University. A few years ago he received the degree of LL.D., from Middlebury College. For two years he was the editor of the _Saturday Evening Gazette_. In 1870 Messrs. Ginn & Heath became his publishers, and brought out his "School Shakspere" in three volumes, containing seven plays each. In 1872 he put into two volumes the substance of his earlier volumes on "Shakspere's Characters," revising, condensing, rewriting his earlier work, parts of which he had outgrown, and presenting his final opinions, under the title of Shakspere's "Life, Art, and Characters," which he dedicated to his friend, Mr. Joseph Burnett, of Southboro'. It is but a few years since his "Harvard Shakspere" was brought out.