lum vitæ, the very marrow of its metaphors.-It would perish like a mouse in an exhausted receiver; or die like a gentleman of fashion, of having nothing to do.

Why this formidable distaste to us and ours should exist, we dare scarcely ask. In what part of our settled opulence, or generous and vast supremacy, or acknowledged literary preeminence, or free constitution, alike superior to individual tyranny, and the rashness, sullen absurdity, and wild and implacable domination of a mob; the fatal fount of those waters of bitterness lies, we must leave to the Americans themselves to say. Some part of it has been attributed to our tourists. But this we cannot comprehend: they were the very men after the transatlantic heart, the elect, to whom the call of the land of republicanism and cheap legislation would have gone forth, and plucked out of an unregenerate and peerage-burthened realm. They were no highborn personages, no hereditary haters of rabble presumption, and likely to be shocked by the easy famili arity of the land where the footman disdains every thing but his wages, and the scavenger shoulders the president from the wall;-no English ecclesiastics, accustomed to the grave decorum and temperate doctrines of the Established Church, and liable to be startled by the miserable mixture of ignorance and folly, gloomy ferocity, and giddy rant that characterize fanaticism by law.-No fastidious men of literary name, accustomed to the requisitions and refinements of English lettered society, and alienable by the perversion of our language, and by a perpetual, indigent imitation of our authorship, furious at being found out, yet compelled to live on this clandestine plunder, or die of inanition. They were no English gentlemen, men of feeling and delicacy, accomplished in the knowledge and graceful habits of English life, and repellable by the tavern existence of America; by captains and colonels serving out their own gin; by judges of the land relaxing from their professional labours, in rifle practice for their next duel; by the public slave markets; by the gougings, scalpings, and other abundant and brilliant proofs of the forest blood and Indian inheritance of the virgin soil of Liberty!

Quite the contrary. They were, to a man, Reformers of the first water, pure Republicans, shrinking in every fibre of their enlightened sensibilities from the inveterate despotism of the British Constitution! Men starting up from the depths of life, unpolluted by aristocratic contact, and unstained by the knowledge of any Church beyond a Conventicle; any authorship beyond Pame; or any society beyond that of the cellars and shops of the Whig metropolis of Manchester; the true opera

tives of muscular discontent and democracy resolved to " die or be free" the vigorous sons of the mire, loving their own republican nudity better than the imperial purple!

But, to come to individuals. Who were Fearon and his followers? Actual missionaries from a band of "patriots," who, hating England, determined to set up their rest in the world of innocence and equal rights beyond the seas. If America were on her trial, she would have packed those men for a jury. What they wrote or reported of the United States is not worth our repeating. Yet, fully acceding to all that can be said of their innate vulgarism, we must give them credit for sincerity. And it would be wiser in the Americans to refute than to rail; and wiser still to reform at home before they began to gather abuses abroad. Those men saw much; they may not have found their way into the very narrow circle of the very highest society; which, notwithstanding the boasted national equality, is as much more inaccessible than that of Europe, as the pride of money is more arrogantly exclusive than the pride of birth; but, to the great mass of American society they had complete and constant access. The elegantes of New York, or the cabinet coterie of Washington, make but minute fragments of the national physiognomy. It is the tavern, the forge, the forest village, the rude and clamorous seaport, that in a new country are the true locations of the national character, the little camps by the desert wells, the spots of life in that huge map of the wilderness yet only dotted with civilization. Those men pursued it wherever it could be found; they traversed British America length and breadth; by kingdoms of forest and kingdoms of waters; they swept it by circles of longitude and latitude; and as of he fruit their traverse they brought back a variety of local knowledge which not one in a million of the natives could ever have attained or dreamed of attaining, and of which, however it may be prudent to avail themselves for future change, all contradiction is now impossible.

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Dr. Hobart's pamphlet opens with a dedication to an English gentleman. This profound civility, which in its first half dozen words acknowledges that it must be unacceptable; " I know too well your attachment to England, to suppose that you will approve of all the sentiments expressed in this Disî course;" will doubtless be valued by that excellent and genuinely patriotic individual just as it deserves. Yet it is by no means clear that the doctor might not owe much of the English bpublicity of his pamphlet to the name of his English entertainer. -bvsqo OUTI ONI ¿191zeroneid to alloqortem gidW ads to egode

Pamphlets are with us, like Homer's flies, a troublesome and short-lived race, perpetually recurring and rapidly brushed away. Even Dr. Hobart's labours might have shared the common fate, and his virtuous indignation have been lost to mankind, but for the happiness with which he consigned it over to that individual; and thus luckily discharged at once the parental duty of protecting his offspring, and the debt of gratitude for introductions and hospitalities had and received.

In every page of the work, there is that palpable consciousness which always implies something wrong; that restless eagerness of apology which shews a feeling of being without excuse; that assumption of lofty motives, which leaves no doubt on the mind that the writer would find it difficult to clear himself of some of a different species. What is the very first page of this performance? Actually, a culling and blazoning of all the passages in which he has condescended to speak civilly of England. It is by this pleasant device that he is to lead us on into the full castigation reserved for our atrocities in his book; those are the roses and blossoms that are to strew our path till we reach the pitfall; it is by those calls to our giddy vanity and English predilections that we are to be entrapped into the American ambuscade, and come within reach of fire!

"The author of the following Sermon is extremely solicitous, &c. &c. that he should not be supposed to undervalue the institutions of England, nor be deemed deficient in the acknowledgment of the debt of gratitude which is due to England for the civil and religious blessings which his countrymen have derived from the land of their fathers. To prove that these imputations cannot with justice be fixed on him, he begs leave to collect from his sermon the following passages.'

He then proceeds to soothe us with half a dozen passages of panegyric, toilsome and repugnant enough, and which we should be so far from exacting from any foreigner, that we should instinctively turn away from the man who offered it, as trifling with us, and from the praise, as overloaded flattery. However, Dr. Hobart makes ample amends in his further pages for any false elevation of our national self-importance. We have heard of letters of the bitterest wrath couched in the blandest style; of hostile proclamations in which the "undersigned" professed the "most unextinguishable respect" for each other; of challenges to combat within the next half hour concluding with polite enquiries, and “ your most obedient servant." But the doctor has given us the first

instance of a libel for the good of our souls, headed by a frontispiece of panegyrics on our souls and bodies, government and religion, and the whole calling itself a Sermon.

This Sermon is a singular compound. Politics; the picturesque ; piety; the general chastisement of England, and the general supremacy, dignity, and purity of America, people, faith, manners, and ministry for the time being; are the materials of one of the most miscellaneous compositions that ever issued from the press. Whether England will be more punished or purified by it, is beyond our power to tell; but our opinion is that neither result will occur in any very formidable degree, and that this effort of the travelled pen will less excite the virtue of reform among us, than the sin of something not very remote from utter carelessness of the castigator.

First, of the Dr.'s politics. It was perhaps, not to be presumed that a foreigner coming among us for a month or two, and in that time busied in running through the round of our sights, should have had time to acquaint himself deeply with our polity. A vast quantity of those vague and clamorous fooleries about government and religion, which pass from the lips of noisy ignorance into the ears of ignorance silent and submissive; that kind of disquisition which flourishes in the columns of a newspaper, and gives an hour's importance to the debates of the ale house; or that more cunningly distilled product of bitter prejudice and wilful misconception which sustains the drunken, desperate consistency of an Atheist Review, and makes it, in the party phrase, die hard; must have come athwart the stranger's first perceptions. For all this we should make allowance; we should not be too stern in our demands of enquiry; it might be but fair to make a handsome admission for the surprise of faculties new to the topic; for the natural unacquaintance of a man born and bred three thousand miles off, with the spirit, literature and laws of England; and most of all, for the visionary weakness and pastoral simplicity of the gentle shepherd of an obscure flock setting up its little fold on the edge of the wilderness. But we were not prepared for the extreme peculiarity of the doctor's opinions. If Jeremy Bentham might boast of him as a disciple in ecclesiastical matters, the Scotch œconomists seem to have enlightened him on government, and to have completed his knowledge of the constitution. There can be no imaginable mistake in determining in what class to place the politician who asserts the "Sovereign Majesty" of the people thus. "The people only are the source of that political power, which when exercised according to the legitimate forms of

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the constitution which they have established, cannot be resisted, but under the penalty of resisting the ordinance of God." We are to remember that in America the populace carry all before them. Well may he say, and thankful are we for the fact, that "in those respects the American governments differ from that of England." He next tells us that" in England the principle of representation is only partially carried into practice." He next takes a more ample leaf from his authorities, and tells us, that "It is impossible not to form a melancholy contrast between the power, &c. &c. of the classes of rank and political consequence, with (and) the dependent, and often abject condition of the lower orders and not to draw the conclusion, that the one is the unavoidable result of the other." Here he goes beyond his code, and Smith would have. told him, that nothing could be more fantastic than to suppose that, the title or opulence of a man of rank had any thing to do with public depression: that, on the contrary, so far as manners went, the higher the rank the greater the urbanity, for the obvious reason that men are punctilious only about disputed dignity; he would have further told him, that the higher the rank and opulence of a landlord, the better for those under his protection and on his estate; and that the possession of extensive property is, when rightly administered, one of the greatest possible advantages to society, inasmuch as one man with ten thousand a year, can do more in the way of patronage of the arts or agriculture, or of individuals, or of the general benefit of his neighbourhood, twenty men of a thousand a year each, whose income must naturally be absorbed in their immediate expenditure. The man of wealth has a reserve for public service, the man of mediocrity has none.

He next tells us in the same unhappy spirit that "the hereditary elevation of one small class of society must produce, in all the noble qualities which distinguish independent freemen, a corresponding depression of the great mass of the community." Here again he plunges deeper than his masters, who would have told him that, if in America the elevation of a man's neighbour is supposed to degrade him, in England the feeling is different, and at once more dignified and more true. Can there be too many stimulants to public exertion? Or is there to be but one distinction, the gross one of money. Or shall a nation be deprived of at once the cheapest, the most generous, and the most animating of all rewards to the highest order of minds, personal and hereditary honours? Or, so far from "the degradation of the qualities of independ