vulgar insolence, and creates feelings of discontent. The poor did not appear to him so poor as in other countries, and the most wretched cottages in our Devonshire villages had a something which was wanting in America; they were 'very poor indeed, but the windows generally whole and clean; no old hats or bundles of rags stuck in as in America, where people build but do not repair.' These marks of squalid poverty are to be found among us, but they are not frequent enough to meet the eye of a traveller. He thought there were far fewer children to be seen about the houses; -the old world is not less prolific than the new, and the children were probably at school or at work. Our rivers suffer by comparison with the Delaware, and the Hudson, and the St. Lawrence. He repeats the story of a lady, who, asking an Englishman if they had in England any rivers like the Seine, interrupted herself, and added laughingly, 'How can I be so silly? it is an island; there are no rivers!" And M. Simond adds, I really think the lady was not so very much in the wrong.' He seems to think that the beauty of a river must be in proportion to its magnitude, and so determined is he to see nothing beautiful in the rivers of an island, that when speaking of the prospect from Richmond Hill, he says the prospect would not be materially injured if the Thames were dried up, and its muddy bed filled and sanded over.' It is no wonder that he has so little knowledge of pictures and of poetry! that he should call the song of the nightingale 'a lively, pleasing, vulgar sort of melody,' and say that Hamlet is one of the most illconceived and inexplicable of Shakspeare's plays.' Such opinions in all matters of taste might be expected in the man who can see no beauty in the Thames at Richmond. Non omnes omnia possumus; and it is well for us that we cannot; for if all men possessed the same powers, coveted the same objects, and pressed forward after the same pursuits, there would be more bickering and jostling than there is in a world wherein, Heaven knows! there is already but too much. The painter has no need of the musician's ear; the musician stands as little in want of the painter's eye: the analyzing and anatomizing spirit which the physical sciences demand would stifle the imagination and deaden the feelings of a poet; while the man of business and the man of the world require only such talents as are the world's current coin, and bear the impress of the age. In some rare instances, indeed, the germs of every intellectual faculty seem to have been given in such proportions, that the gifted possessor might have attained to pre-eminence in any line which he chose; but life is not long enough to cultivate them all, and perhaps the mind, in this its limited sphere, has not scope for their devolopement. If the ruling faculty does not, like Aaron's rod, swallow up the rest (which it seems to do where great

powers of calculation exist, or an extraordinary verbal memory,) yet, like trees in a thicket, that which shoots up with most vigour overtops the rest, and, by overshadowing, dwarfs them. These remarks are applicable to the writer before us, by whose faults they have been suggested: he is a wretched connoisseur, and a miserable critic; and, like most critics, presumptuous in proportion to his incapacity; but he reasons with candour and sagacity upon subjects within his reach, and we shall revert to his remarks, more especially to his political observations, with the respect which they

deserve.

Laying aside his volumes for the present, we must notice those of Mr. Silliman, who visited Europe with the pleasant and honourable commission to purchase philosophical and chemical apparatus, and books for Yale College in Connecticut. Coming in this character, the American traveller brought with him such feelings as became a man of letters and a member of that commonwealth in which all distinctions of country should be forgotten, or remembered only when principles and paramount interests are at stake. His Journal represents England to the Americans as it is, and exhibits to the English a fair specimen of the real American character. For there are two distinct classes of people in America; the descendants of those old settlers who carried with them habits of strict morality and austere religion'; and the modern swarm of emigrants, renegadoes and refugees, who are neither incommoded with one nor the other. The former have outgrown the intolerance and bigotry of their ancestors, but retained their virtues, and embellished them by humaner manners; they have been born under the form of government for which their fathers sighed in secret, and are republicans as much by principle and duty, as by prejudice and inhe ritance. Of such persons the federal party is chiefly composed. 'It has on its side,' to use the words of the Gallo-American traveller, a decided majority of the talents, the wealth, and the gentility of the country; from all appearance, I might say, of the morality also? -he adds, 'if I was not aware that much may be placed to the ac count of principles which are the effect of situation.' Most of the men who from principle bore arms against England during the revo lution are now of this, which is the English party, to which Washington himself adhered during the last years of his life. But this party is as inferior in numbers as it is superior in every moral and intellectual qualification to the democrats, as they style themselves. Many of these are descended from persons who left England, not on account of their virtues, nor for their good deserts; a large proportion are emigrants, of the present generation; of this class undoubtedly there are many who left their native country in the hope of bettering their condition by honest and honourable industry;

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others to whom error only is imputable, who imagined that more liberty must be enjoyed under a republican government than, in their imagination, existed here; but there are also political desperadoes whose revolutionary schemes had been frustrated at home, -refugees, not for conscience-sake, not for any principle, political or religious, but for the sake of escaping their creditors and the laws of their country, adventurers of the worst description, men of no fortunes, or of broken ones, with principles as loose as their allegiance, inflamed hearts and blasted characters, the disgrace of the country which they have left, and the pest and scandal of that which has received them. It is certain that far the greater number of those newspapers which laboured so assiduously to create a war between England and the United States, and which during that war endeavoured not less assiduously to exasperate it by every imaginable means of insult and audacious falsehood, were edited, not by Americans, but emigrants, Scotch, Irish, and English.

Mr. Silliman is a good representative of the best American character. He is republican enough, while he admires the cheerfulness and willingness of the servants in England, to consider the surly manners of the same class in America, and the sullen salvo for personal dignity' with which they render their services, as proceeding from a cause which a patriot would not wish to remove,the multiplied resources and superior condition of the lower orders in America. No person will dispute the position that lesser evils are to be disregarded when they necessarily arise from a greater good; that position, however, is not applicable here. The inconvenience, in itself not inconsiderable, and of which all Americans complain, arises from the absurd manner in which principles of political equality have been promulgated; and instead of being, as Mr. Silliman persuades himself, indicative of a happier state of things than exists in England, it is symptomatic of a most perilous disease in the body politic. Universal suffrage has literally made the people the sovereign in America; and the Gallo-American traveller has most ably pointed out the dangers which for that reason are in full view. Governors must obey the sovereign people or be dismissed, but the sovereign people are the multitude, and the multitude are the poor; they envy the rich, and in America there is nothing to soften the inequality,-no ties of hereditary respect, no gradation of ranks,-scarcely any distinction but the broad and perilous one between the poor and the rich. The measures of government in America must therefore be unfavourable to the rich, and consequently to commerce, which is in that country the only road to riches.

'A little more poverty in the multitude,' says this judicious writer, and property will fall an easy prey by such means as an income tax

assessed arbitrarily by commissioners in support of any popular mea sures, by the establishment of a national paper money,-by a maximum, perhaps. The insecurity of property will then operate, as it has done everywhere in Turkey, in Persia, for instance, and in a less degree in those parts of Europe where the government could raise arbitrary taxes on industry, and where the administration of justice was dependent. The insecurity of property is invariably followed by relaxation of industry and improvements, ignorance and rudeness, and finally the establishment of a simple arbitrary government. It is no new observation, that every revolution contains the seeds of another most opposite in its nature, and scatters them behind it. We have yet to see what is to spring up in America from a purely popular revolution."

Mr. Silliman is disgusted with our Vauxhall, and with the open and scandalous immoralities by which the London theatres are disgraced; the principles which call forth this condemnation may be derived from the old Puritans, but they are well founded; and well regulated minds must acknowledge that the censure is but too well deserved. The prejudices of a white man who has been accustomed to the sight of slavery exist in him still so strongly, that he is disgusted at the catastrophe of Inkle and Yarico in the play,* and wishes it were possible to extricate Mr. Inkle,' as he calls him, 'from so unpleasant an embarrassment as that of acknowleding a sable female for his wife,' which, he says, in a great measure destroys the moral effect of the story. This is language which we should not have expected from a moral and religious man; but it shows how impossible it is to breathe without injury an atmosphere contaminated with slavery. Our young gentry appeared to him 'probably the handsomest men on earth; this he ascribes in great measure to their habits of activity, which keep them in florid health, and to the 'correctness' of their dress. There is less finery, he says, than in America, and very few fops; the footmen are almost the only coxcombs seen in London.'-Mr. Silliman, it is to be feared, did not happen to pass through Bond-street or St. James's at the fashionable hours. In the country he is struck with the striking similarity of our domestic manners to those of New England, and expresses his surprise that a lapse of almost two centuries, and a state of things in many important particulars so widely different, should not have produced a greater deviation in the new country from the original manners and habits of the 'parent island.' This we rejoice to hear; for assuredly no manners were ever more favourable to the developement of our moral and intellectual nature, nor more conducive to private happiness and public weal, than the domestic manners of England. Wherever

* The afterpiece that night happened to be Tom Thumb, and Mr. Silliman gravely criticises it as if it were a serious composition.

these seeds are sown they will bring forth the same fruits; and the best wish that can be formed for mankind is, that they may be disseminated as widely as possible. Profligate demagogues, the renegadoes of one country and the pests of both, may assist an infatuated faction to excite and foster in the Americans a hatred towards England; but it is an unnatural hatred,-a monstrous enmity,for no circumstance can possibly destroy the bonds of affinity between the two nations; they have lisped the same mother-tongue, they have been fed at the same breasts of religion,-they derive their knowledge from the same reservoirs and fountain springs; they communicate in the same bread of life. The American is indebted to England for every thing which has humanized, every thing which may adorn, every thing which can ennoble the character; and that the old Americans, the genuine people of the country, feel this, is evinced by the volumes before us. England is to them what Italy and Greece are to the classical scholar, what Rome is to the Catholic, and Jerusalem to the Christian world. Almost every hamlet, says Mr. Silliman, has been the scene of some memorable action, or the birth place of some distinguished person. It is interesting to observe this feeling, and trace its manifestation in a writer who makes no ostentation of his feelings, and who never disfigures his plain and faithful journal by any affectation of eloquence or of sentiment. He visited Thomson's grave at Richmond, the house in which he had resided, and the summer-house in the garden where he composed many of his poems. He wished also to visit Pope's villa, and his grotto, and his willow, which had not then been cut down; but 'positive orders' had been given that no person should see the house, and 'we were obliged,' he says, 'to content ourselves with merely an external view of a building which was once honoured by the presence of the illustrious bard.-I make no reflections on Sir John Briscoe, the present possessor: he may have the best reasons for this seeming illiberal conduct.' At Hampton Court he was imprest with a thought 'partaking at once of moral grandeur and of grateful melancholy, that he was actually in a palace, and that kings, queens, and illustrious men had trod the boards that were then beneath his feet. He describes to his countrymen the colour, the flight, and the song of the skylark, so much celebrated by the poets,—and the tower guns, of which they read so often in the newspapers,' and which in latter years have so often excited the proudest feelings of patriotism and joy in every true Englishman within hearing of their triumphant sound. An American who remembers that he is English by descent, language, and religion, that is to say, by every tie of moral and intellectual relationship, may be envied for his sensations in England. Greece and Italy, however interesting the recollections which they awaken,