The press has been encumbered with every kind of scribbling in return; for all these "wefts and strays" think that their follies and crudities are worthy of immortal remembrance. But, ignorant, or angry, as these adventurers were, there was still a large portion of truth to be found in their rude delineations. The Americans are indignant at finding so much detail of tavern-life, of mob-supremacy, and of habitual slang in those tours. But of what is a tourist to write but of what he sees; and what American, to be trusted on his oath, will deny that ninety-nine hundredths of native existence consist in tavern-life, in squatters and boors, cotton-planters, colonels and captains selling gin, and setting the example of its deglutition, and judges, brutal, brawling, and shooting each other. For, what else can the state of society be in any such country? The Americans do not yet pretend to that supremacy over human nature which they so fondly vindicate for their posterity, and, with our knowledge of mankind, in its present iron age, we are still fully convinced, that even the most civilized population of civilized Europe, flung loose into the wilderness, would be, in a dozen years, as like what the mass of the North American population at this hour is, as the thews and sinews of an European are like the thews and sinews of an American. We see the experiment made in minor portions every day. Turn the sober, toiling, farmer of Yorkshire into the prairie, a thousand miles from the habitable world; and before he has well banked out his weekly inundation, he submerges his soulin gin, carries a rifle when he goes on a visit, pays his debts by shooting his creditor, and, after a brief life of punch and patriotism, dies the lazy and litigious sot that he lived.

The Frenchman, a livelier animal, and fonder of external glories, turns Indian at once, casts away his chapeau for a compost of bear's-grease and feathers, divests himself of his culottes, marries a squaw, and is adopted into the magnificent aboriginal family of the "Brown Bear," or the "Great Opossum," or "Split Skull," or "Walk on the Water." And why are we to suppose that the simple fact of a man's having first hungered and thirsted on the western shore of the Atlantic, is to make him a lover of order and symmetries, soft manners and Shak-speare, in direct contradiction to the whole course of things? By nature every human being hates work, and loves pleasure. The coarser the sense, the stronger grasp does that sense fix upon us. In all parts of the earth, where men can live doing nothing, they do nothing. In England, if the ground produced a maintenance to every man without the sweat of his brow, no brow would ever sweat. It is not the love of moral order,

nor the raptures of industry, nor the health, about which no man cares, till he loses it, that fills the world with ploughs and harrows, and sailors and students and travellers, and the whole inferior operative and bustling machinery of mankind; but hunger, the necessity of giving the gastric juice something to do, the first great duty of three meals a day.

Who is the most restless, dangerous, and sottish disturber in Europe? The Irish peasant. He casts his potatoe into the earth, and the earth returns it tenfold, leaving him the desired leisure to talk treason, listen to insurrectionary eloquence, lay siege to his landlord's house, and expunge the parson from the face of nature. The soil gives him food, the still gives him drink, and with his stomach filled with fire and poison, and his brain turgid with folly and crime, he shoulders his pike, and makes laws for the land.

In America the insurrectionary passion is extinguished, by being scattered over a wilderness. The explosive gas, that compression makes terrible, floats away, free and harmless, over the lake and the forest. But gross personal indulgence finds its fullest aliment in the loneliness and productiveness of a newly settled land.

The absurdity on the American side was, to have taken this description of the general rudeness as an insult to the particular civilization. The scholars of Boston, and the gentlemen of New-York, childishly felt themselves bound to be implicated in the ridicule of the tavern-hunter, the inn-keeper, and the back-woods-man; and every forehead darkened, and, every pen was dipped in immitigable hostility. Walshe, a clever man, and with a character to lose, lost it without delay, swallowed his English words in an American pamphlet, and perished, a burlesque sacrifice to a contemptible popularity.

In the midst of this irritation Mr. Irving's first work, his "Sketches" appeared. It had merits of its own. But it had the still higher attraction of appearing at the moment when all the animosity of the war had died away, and when the English were willing to clear themselves from the imputation of a general prejudice against the men of America. His book was turned into a happy and resistless evidence, that we could admire the toil of the transatlantic brain; and for the day, this native of the land of freedom and negro slavery sat in the rays of an easy popularity.

.. If by such things nations can be reconciled to each other, who shall deny their value? If Geoffrey Crayon has been fondled with rather too emphatic an embrace, who shall regret the sudden ardours of the sponsors on both sides; or who will

not send up an aspiration that the age may come when the established panacea for national virulence shall be a volume of "Sketches" applied to the part diseased!

Mr. Irving has been charged with an original determination to purchase popularity by flattering England. But this he has denied, and we owe it to the feelings of an honourable man to believe him. What wonder is there, if he should have been struck with so noble and unmatched a spectacle of human society? What portion or period of the world has presented a combination at once so magnificent and lovely, of external power and internal happiness; a domestic policy so simple, unoppressive, and conformable to the habits and spirit of the people; such unwearied vigour of industry and invention, of commercial enterprize, and of knowledge, graceful and profound? England sits at this hour on a throne, the most glorious to which a beneficent Providence ever led a nation; a dominion not over the wildness and scattered barbarism of a Russian desert, not over the feeble and broken savagery of Asia, but over the great intellectual division of the world. She is, at this hour, the arbiter of Europe. And this perilous and lofty distinction she holds without offence or fear, because she holds it without tyranny, and by the interests of all. What nation does not turn to her in its distress, whether by civil shocks and tumults, or by the hand of Nature? She relieves the famine, and gives a refuge to the exile! What voice cheered the nations of Christendom to hunt down the ravager of the world, atheistic France, and whose hand struck the deathblow? Whose power is it that keeps them, in their triumph, from rending each other? England's. Whatever trial may be reserved for her, the future historian will be compelled to say, that she has stood at the height of human supremacy, holding at once the balance and the sword!

Nothing can be more natural, than that a stranger should be peculiarly struck by this matchless aspect of power and beauty, nor that his surprize should be the more vivid, and his descriptions the more animated, as he came from a country signally differing from England. When the old famous Portuguese and Venetian travellers entered the dominions of the Mogul, or of China, from the Desert, the spectacle of oriental policy and magnificence rose upon them in sudden splendours. When the American pamphleteer lavished his description upon the richness, tranquillity, and freedom of this country; he had but just returned from France, and felt the stimulus of having escaped the thumb-screws, oubliettes, and endless and miserable tyrannies of that imperial dungeon. He spoke largely

and luxuriantly, and notwithstanding his having found it convenient to change his mind since, we fully believe that he was once sincere. The ode was due to his feelings, the palinode was essential to his patriotism.

When Mr. Irving set his foot on our shores, he found himself, probably to his extreme astonishment, in a land where equality was not vulgar levelling, and democracy was not a low, headstrong, and corrupt government of the mob; where men proclaimed and felt their natural rights without a bitter and envious hatred of the venerable and hereditary honours of public talent and virtue; where birth and fortune had their due place, without trampling, or being trampled upon, and where freedom flourished without the sale and slavery of human flesh and blood. To look from society to the face of the landscape; he saw a country of no eminent natural fertility or loveliness converted into a garden by the taste and industry of its people; abundant in all the useful products of life, and uniting with its use the happiest features of rural beauty; great rivers that turned no province into swamps and pestilential shallows; cities that no annual plague stripped of their people; forests where no savage lurked in beggary or revenge; and more than all, fields where no negro tilled the soil for a master with liberty in his mouth, and avarice, cruelty, and tyranny in his bosom.

We are so far from suspecting Mr. Irving, or his predecessor, of intending to exaggerate, that we are persuaded of their having reduced their panegyric, "strong meat for men, milk for babes;" and, that in administering the truth to America, they were not incautious what kind of truth America would be content to hear of her parent and her leader in the great path of letters, civilization, and empire.

The charges of borrowing from English literature are allowed, but with as little blame. From what other source has any American borrowed his ideas? from what other source can any American borrow? He has no native literature. He has even no material for the foundation of a native literature. What visions, what exalting ancestral recollections, can the wand of poetry summon from the rude traffic of exiles with savages, from sectarian bickerings and Indian massacre, from the unhappy life of fugitives struggling with the difficulties of a strange and unpropitious land, or from the brutishness, squalidness, and ferocity of the wigwam.

He finds Europe all historical, full of the great memorials and effigies of our human nature in its noblest and most nervous attitudes; a place of the temple and the trophy, of the struggle that founded empire, and the mighty battle that subverted it

when it was to perish; her fields trodden by the long and splendid march of the masters of the world, each, as it went down to the grave, leaving evidence of its day of supremacy, in some immortal monument of arts or arms; until Europe, and eminently England, is now the inheritor of the Greek, the Roman, and the Italian mind; and still endued with the energy, intellectual power, and majestic ambition, destined to enlarge even her inheritance of glory.

Mr. Irving's present volumes contain four classes of tales. Under the heads of" Strange Stories by a nervous Gentleman;" ;""Buckthorne and his Friends;" "The Italian Banditti," and "The Money Diggers.'

We shall give some extracts from these stories, chiefly illustrative of the writer's more advantageous style. "The Young Italian" is the narrative of an enthusiast, who becomes an artist and a lover. He is educated under the superintendance of a recluse relative.

"My uncle was a man totally estranged from the world; he had never relished, for he had never tasted, its pleasures; and he considered rigid self-denial as the great basis of christian virtue. He considered every man's temperament like his own; or at least he made

them conform to it. His character and habits had an influence over the fraternity of which he was superior-a more gloomy, saturnine set of beings were never assembled together. The convent, too, was calculated to awaken sad and solitary thoughts. It was situated in a gloomy gorge of those mountains away south of Vesuvius. All distant views were shut out by sterile volcanic heights. A mountainstream raved beneath its walls, and eagles screamed about its turrets.

"I had been sent to this place at so tender an age as soon to lose all distinct recollection of the scenes I had left behind. As my mind expanded, therefore, it formed its idea of the world from the convent and its vicinity, and a dreary world it appeared to me. An early tinge of melancholy was thus infused into my character; and the dismal stories of the monks, about devils and evil spirits, with which they affrighted my young imagination, gave me a tendency to superstition which I could never effectually shake off. They took the same delight to work upon my ardent feelings, that had been so mischievously executed by my father's household. I can recollect the horrors with which they fed my heated fancy during an eruption of Vesuvius. We were distant from that volcano, with mountains between us; but its convulsive throes shook the solid foundations of nature. Earthquakes threatened to topple down our convent towers. A lurid, baleful light hung in the heavens at night, and showers of ashes, borne by the wind, fell in our narrow valley. The monks talked of the earth being honey-combed beneath us; of streams of molten lava raging through. its veins, of caverns of sulphurous flames roaring in the centre, the