18

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES-BEGINNING OF THE END.

:

which the Revolution threw into their hands. In the notice, Mr. Prescott has more in common with Ireland, the M'Hales and Higgenses are not ill-Jeffrey but there is not the refined and critical adapted to be precursors of some Irish Ronge; acumen with the delicate sarcasm, which distinand the ardor of some ecclesiastical repealers is guished the editor of the Edinburgh; neither are likely enough to predispose the Catholic aristoc- the subjects always so interesting, at least they racy to a schism. As at the time of the Lutheran are not treated so largely or so broadly.-SpecReformation, the Italian priesthood will in all tator. probability make it a question of national ascendancy in the church; and Austria, from fear of all innovation, will support them. In Italy and the Austrian dominions, the schism is least likely to be felt; though in the latter, German Catholicism may find a point d'appui in Transylvania, while in the more sequestered districts of Moravia and Bohemia the traditional influence of the doctrines of the Moravian Brothers and John of Huss may not yet be utterly extinct.

The progress of this new sect is a matter of general interest; for it may alter the relations of internal parties in most European states, and diminish or increase the territories of leading bers of the great European confederation.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

RECKLESS Speculators, when their bills were about to fall due, have been known to draw other bills for larger sums, discount them at a loss, and meet the present liability by incurring a greater at no distant period. Financial operations of this kind have been generally understood to indicate the desperation of men whose career was near a close.

If this symptom has been rightly interpreted, there is good ground to apprehend that the general mem-railway crash, which has been anxiously looked forward to by many, cannot be far distant. The parties who have speculated in "shares" beyond their means are devising plans to raise money for present use at the risk of increased liabilities for the future-if not, indeed, plans for drawing their own necks out of the noose and leaving others dangling as Punch leaves the hangman.

Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. By WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, author of "The History of Ferdinand and Isabella," &c.

Some ingenious Scotchmen are about to open

railway speculators, which the more cautious purpose principally of making advances to assist established banks refuse; and in the prospectuses of some of these companies, the names of gentlemen who occupy conspicuous positions in the list of parties holding railway shares to the amount of not all: the prospectuses intimate that the interim 20007. and upwards figure as directors. This is directors are to retain the absolute management in their hands for the first year; and that, as most of the shares are already appropriated, offers for those that have been reserved will only be received from capitalists of unquestionable solidity.

wherewithal to pay inconvenient calls does honor The conception of this scheme for raising the to the ingenuity of the contrivers. But the delition. The hint that none but parties with plenty cate conception is spoiled by the bungling execuof cash will be received into the copartnery, and that the management is to be left entirely in the hands of the present partners, is rather too broad. Jeremy Diddler's "Sam! you have not such a thing as half-a-crown about you?" was a refined finesse in comparison.

WITH the exception of a life of Brown the novelist, written for Spark's American Biography, this volume consists of a dozen articles by Mr. Prescott, originally published in the North Ameri-new joint-stock banks or loan companies, for the can Review. The collection has probably originated in the success which has attended the same kind of reprint in the cases of Sydney Smith, Macaulay, and Jeffrey; but Mr. Prescott's reviews seem unlikely to attract similar attention in a collected shape. The article is the form in which the three writers just mentioned gave their principal prose productions to the world; not surely by accident, or to meet the market for periodical literature, but because their genius and their habits induced them to throw their best thoughts into that particular style of composition. Mr. Prescott's strength lies in another and perhaps a higher line; and these reviews and notices strike us as being rather effusions than studies. It is not to be inferred from this remark that they are crude or careless, in despite of the author's intimation that he so esteems them; but that he has not thrown himself into them with all his heart and with all his strength, which are exhibited to most advantage in another direction. Indeed, the very excellence of these papers for their original place less adapts them for another. They are strictly "notices," especially where the book is new; containing an account of the subject, abridged, condensed, or distilled from the work under notice -general remarks, perhaps "common-places," upon the subject and its correlatives, where such matter is in place and a criticism upon the book or hero of the biography, always good-natured and mostly brief. But there is none of that sublimated and searching sense mingled with the scorching facetiousness which gave originality and permanence to the views of Sydney Smith, and preserved them by a salt not Attic but his own. have looked in vain for the florid brilliancy of narrative, disquisition, or illustration, mingled with exaggeration in fact and perhaps paradox in conclusion, which give such force and spirit to Macaulay's articles, whether putting forward his own views or dressing up the matter he "conveys" from his author. In the general characteristics of

We

kites does harm within a very limited sphere: The private blower of wind-bills and flier of but joint-stock banks, when the speculation mania is rife, have a Warner's "long range" of mischief in them. It is consoling to reflect, that in is not combined with adequate skill of execution. the present instances recklessness of consequences Spectator, August 30.

A BATCH of one-pound notes, amounting to 6327., was paid into the Bank on Friday week, by the trustees to the will of James Satcherley, an old man, (a beggar,) who died in a cellar at Shadwell some weeks back. After his decease, the notes and other moneys were found concealed, together with a species of will, in a cupboard. The notes must have been hoarded many years.

WEATHER-PANICS.

king to follow the courses of anatomy, medicine, THE moist and foggy climate of England is pro- French doctor in the service of Persia, and his and surgery professed by Mirza-Labal-Khan, a verbial with foreigners, and matter of half-melanmajesty's first physician. The most distinguished choly joke with Englishmen themselves. The perpetual verdure of our fields bespeaks us deni-pupils will be sent to France, at the expense of zens of a rainy zone-inhabitants of an intermit-government, to complete their studies, and to comting shower-bath. Our speech bewrayeth us; the Many of these young men, belonging to the first plete their knowledge of European civilization weather is ever uppermost in our thoughts, and families in the court of the shah, have already the first thing spoken of when friends meet. arrived at Paris; where they will remain for four Aquarius is our constellation. or five years."

AN American writer, whose letter appears in the Memorial de Rouen, describes a miracle of mechanical science, of the "wonderful if true" class. "William Evans has resolved a problem, which must overturn our present system of railway and steain-boat propulsion. By means of enormous compression, he has succeeded in liquifying atmospheric air; and then a few drops only of some chemical composition, poured into it, suffice to make it resume its original volume with an elastic force quite prodigious. An experiment on a large scale has just been made. A train of twenty loaded wagons was transmitted a distance of sixty miles in less than an hour and a quarter-the whole motive power being the liquid air enclosed in a vessel of two gallons and a half measure; into which fell, drop by drop, and from minute to minute, the chemical composition in question. Already subscriptions are abundant, and a society is in course of formation. The inventor declares that an ordinary packet-boat may make the passage from Philadelphia to Havre in eight days, carrying a ton of this liquid air. A steam-engine of six-horse-power will produce that quantity in eight hours.

The natives of such a clime might naturally be imagined as exempt from fear of rain as Mephistopheles alleges Faust, the sworn brother of the Devil, ought to be from fear of fire. It is their element, which they ought to know cannot harm them or theirs. Yet they are as shy of rain as a kitten of dew when it first ventures abroad of a morning. England is a land where short crops occasionally occur, but where the years of utter blight which often lay other lands desolate are scarcely known: despite our frequent wet, raw, and ungenial summers, within the memory of our fathers and fathers' fathers seed-time and harvest have not failed. Yet to an Englishman a wet month of July immediately conjures up visions of famine with pestilence and bankruptcies in its train. Burns was wrong when he said that they who are "constantly on poortith's brink" are little terrified by the sight: it is only those who are steeped in it over head and ears who become resigned to their fate. It is in those to whom a chance of emerging seems still open that the fear is strongest, to which the thoughtless Dives and the desperate Lazarus are alike inaccessible. And so with Englishmen and the weather. Were their climate one in which no corn could grow, they would never think of crops; and were it so genial that the crops were always redundant, they would wax insensiTHE Constitutionnel mentions the discovery of a ble to the blessing from sheer excess. But, living remarkable cavern near Guelma, in Africa. This in a region to which hope ever comes, and from cavern is formed in an immense calcareous rock, which fear never entirely departs, they abandon and has but one entrance, which is to the norththemselves too readily to unmanly fears. They are ward. It descends to a depth of 400 metres (the weather valetudinarians, a nation of Gratianos-metre is about a yard) below the surface of the "the wind cooling their broth blows them to an ague."

The public is slowly recovering from a sharp paroxysm of this kind. During the last two or three days it has been laid out to dry in the sun; and as it warms in the rays, it begins to admit that Englishmen and English crops, like English frogs, take a great deal of drowning.-Spectator, 23 Aug.

PERSIA.-The Journal des Débats contains a

letter from Tehran, giving a rapid and highly favorable review of the reforms instituted by FethAli-Shah, the present King of Persia. One passage in the letter is especially interesting. "Now that complete harmony reigns between Persia and the neighboring states, the king, seconded by Hadji-Mirza-Agassi, [his former tutor and present minister,] continues to ameliorate as much as possible the administration of all public offices. Following out the suggestions which have been made, he has established in his palace a school for the French language, in order to train interpreters and translators. This instruction, which has been intrusted to the first secretary-interpreter of the king, will establish new ties of sympathy between Persia and civilized Europe; it will become in time a real normal school which will furnish a machinery for all scientific pursuits. Already sevral pupils of this school have been selected by the

earth, by an inclined plane, the extreme length 1,200 metres. It is furnished with stalactites of a thousand different forms, and the passage is impeded by huge blocks of stone which have detached themselves from the vault. But that which contributes most to the interest of this immense cavern, is the Latin inscriptions which are carved near the entrance, and which belong to the early ages of Christianity. Most of them are illegible; however, among them may be very distinctly deciChristians of Africa took refuge in this place durphered the name "Donatus." No doubt, the first the most absurd legends about it; and none of ing the periods of persecution. The Arabs relate them ever venture in, dreading to be seized by the However, the French, who explored it, succeeded guardian genius who is supposed to dwell there. in persuading the Sheik Deradji-Ben-Kerad to accompany them; previously to which, not a soul is supposed to have disturbed the silence of it for many centuries.

'IN one of Mr. Hosken's granite quarries, near Penryn, the other day," says the Falmouth Packet, "a fine mass of granite, which admeasures about 14,000 cubic feet, its weight above 1,000 tons, was detached from the surrounding rock by means of a charge of twenty-five pounds of gunpowder. In the explosion, the entire mass was distinctly seen to leap from its natural bed."

From the Examiner.

cates the Younger Pliny in a fit of fatal curiosity

Letters from Italy. By J. T. HEADLEY. Wiley at Pompeii; and is reminded of nothing so much,

and Putnam.

THIS is a very droll book; a perfect picture of young America swaggering about Italian towns, with its hat exceedingly on one side, its hands in its coat pockets, and snatches of an entirely unknown tongue on its lips. The letters present the uncommon feature of not having been originally written with a view to publication. Their inditer is of opinion that they would "very probably have been worse written if they had been." In that case (though we question its possibility) they would have been curiosities indeed. In the author's own choice language, they would have been calculated to "corner" the public pretty considerably.

on the Appian Way, as of the efforts of the "Pelasgi" to crush the infant empire!

But we liked to have forgotten," as Mr. Headley says, two personal anecdotes, which show how easily a modest traveller may confound specialities with generalities. This is the first: "The other day I was leaning over the balcony of our window at the hotel, watching the motley groups that passed and repassed, and listening to the strange Genoese jargon that every one seemed to understand but myself, when my attention was attracted by an elegantly dressed woman who was sauntering leisurely along up the street that my window faced. As she came near, her eye fell on me, and, her curiosity apparently excited by my foreign look, she steadily scrutinized me as she approached. My appearance might have been somewhat outré, but still I did not think it was worth such a particular scrutiny, especially from a lady. But she had not the slightest concern about my thoughts on the matter. She wished simply to gratify her own curiosity; so when she had got within the most convenient reconnoitering distance, she deliberately paused, and lifting her quizzing-glass to her eye, coolly scanned me from head to foot. When she had finished, she quietly placed her glass in her belt, and with a smile of self-satisfaction on her face, walked on."

And this, the second:

We must take leave to "dicker" with him, however, (if he will allow us to adopt another of his expressions,) on one or two slight points of fact. We would venture to suggest that the custom which prevails among the washerwomen at Genoa, for instance, of washing clothes in cold water, and in streams and rivers, is not so much attributable to the peculiar and special dearness of fuel in that particular city, as to its being the general practice throughout that small extent of country which lies between Paris and Sicily. We have a confused recollection of having heard or read that the Strada Nuova, the most remarkable street in the same city of Genoa, is both level and straight. The fame of the Roman church of "As I was once coming down from Mount San Giovanni in Laterano has never reached us. Vesuvius, I passed an Italian lady with her husWe came newly to the contemplation of a coin band, who, by their attendants, I took for persons called a scudi. The baiocca is also quite a novel of distinction. I had an immense stick in my kind of currency. We have never heard of a hand, with which I had descended into the crater. marble bridge across the Tiber, built by Michael As I rode slowly by, she turned to me in the Angelo; though we think we have heard of a lit-pleasantest manner, and said, 'Ha un grand bastle bridge and castle named after Saint Angelo, tone, signore,' (you have got a large cane, sir.) who is not generally known to have been identi- I certainly did not respect her less for her 'forcal with the sculptor. The "mazzro" (so called, wardness!!' (civility,) but on the contrary felt perhaps, from having some connexion with the I would have gone any length to have served mazzard; it being described by Mr. Headley as her." the veil of a Genoese woman) is a garment we should of all things like to behold; the name being singular, and, so far as we know, unique.

In each of these cases, Mr. Headley may rely upon it, the lady was drawn towards him by an irresistible personal attraction. As he himself might write it, It was madness-It was love. For as a general principle, nothing on earth can possibly be more unlike the manners and customs of Italian ladies towards strangers in the streets, than these examples.

This entertaining traveller has many styles and methods of communicating his information. Sometimes it is remarkably concise; as where he tells us that "Terracina is a dirty hole-the women blackguards, and the landlord a rascal." Sometimes it is of a rather contradictory nature; as How Mr. Headley got a reputation for "dickwhere he gives us to understand of a certain Com-ering" may be pleasantly observed in this easy modore Morgan that he is "every inch a sailor," little incident.

and consequently that "his soldier-like bearing "In bargaining for our meals and roonis, everyattracts universal attention." Sometimes it is thing was so reasonable that we could not compoetical; as where he holds forth on a certain plain; and for once I did not attempt to beat lady (after calculating the value of her diamonds down the landlord. The entire arrangement of in American dollars) to this agonizing effect; the prices was always left to me in travelling, and "I never saw a being float so through a saloon, I had acquired quite a reputation in dickering with as if her body were a feather, and her soul the zephyr that floated in it." Sometimes he displays a sanguine and a hopeful spirit; as when he says of a certain cicerone, after a long conversation," he began to mistrust I was a sensible

man."

Mr. Headley takes occasion to observe that the "classic land" has long been a portion of "the scholar's dreams;" which would not have been at all an original observation, if he had not meant the dreams of himself. And undoubtedly his scholarship is of the dreamiest kind. He suffo

the thieving Italian landlords and vetturini. We made the man specify the dishes he would give us; and among other things he mentioned an English pudding. This required some discussion; but we finally concluded not to trust an Italian in Salerno with such a dish, and had its place supplied with something else. He promised enough; and I was turning away quite satisfied, when my friends slily hinted at my principle, never to close a bargain with an Italian on his own terms. It would n't do to lose my reputation; and so turning round, I very gravely said:

'I suppose you will throw in the English pud-ments there provided, which are not tempting, he ding.' He as gravely and with blandness re- says, and may certainly be got for ten dollars a plied:-'Oh, yes.' night; he is ever the same agreeable person. With two other anecdotes, also of a personal Perhaps his best aspect is, his unconscious illuscomplexion, we must repudiate our extracts. tration of the natural acuteness of the common people in Italy, who certainly fooled Mr. Headley to the top of his bent-witness his recorded dialogues with them-whenever he gave them a chance.

"This morning I received a note from an American gentleman inviting me to accompany him and his two sisters to the pope's palace on the Quirinal. I was at the reading-room when they started, and as the carriage drove up the wheels came somewhat near to a peppery, half-crazy English cavalry officer. He began to swear and curse the driver, when I, somewhat piqued at his impudence in the presence of the ladies, stept in and told the driver to move on. The officer immediately tipped his hat to me and apologized, and said in the blandest manner, Mr. H., (calling me by name,) I believe your book is not in this library,' (referring to the one attached to the reading-room.) How the fellow knew my name puzzled me, and the question and all taking me quite aback, I replied, What did you say, sir? Are you not from New Orleans, and have you not written a work?' I have not the pleasure of hailing from New Orleans, I replied, nor have I been guilty of writing a book."

From the Examiner.

Journal of an African Cruiser. By an officer of the U. S. Navy. Edited by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Wiley and Putnam.

THIS journal is freshly and cleverly written, and touches on a scene little hackneyed by journalists or travellers. The most inveterate "goer-ahead" of even the author's countrymen, stops short at the west coast of Africa. Few visit there, as he drily remarks in his preface, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer, when arrived there, are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of a common-place book." We may congratulate the officer on his fair amount of activity in that respect. He writes unaffectedly on most subjects, and often with great animation.

Vesuvius is the scene of what follows: "As I sat on the edge of the crater, awed by the spectacle before me, our guide approached with some eatables, and two eggs had been cooked in the steam issuing from one of the apertures we had passed. My friend sat down very deliberately We will not touch upon his views as to the to eat his. I took mine in my hand mechanically, slave trade; however easy it might be to retort but was too much absorbed in the actions of the upon his own government that suspicion of insinsullen monster below me to eat. Suddenly there cerity and doubtful motive which he does not was an explosion louder than any that had pre-scruple to charge upon the English; and which, ceded it, hurling a larger, angrier mass into the air. My hand involuntarily closed tightly over the egg, and I was recalled to my senses by my friend calling out very deliberately at my feet to know what I was doing. I looked down, and there he sat quietly picking the shell from his egg, while mine was running a miniature volcano over his back and shoulders. I opened my hand, and there lay the crushed shell, while the contents were fast spreading over my friend's broadcloth. I laughed outright, sacrilegious as it was. So much you see for the imagination you have so often scolded me about. I had lost my egg, while my friend, who took things more coolly, enjoyed not only the eating of his, but the consciousness of having eaten an egg boiled in the steam of Vesuvius."

With this we may take our leave of Mr. Headley and his letters; heartily thanking him that since this day of dignity, he has been guilty of writing a book; hoping to find him some day "hailing" from some other part of the world: and "tipping our hat" to him gratefully for the entertainment it has given us. For whether we find him pluming himself on his aristocratic Italian acquaintances, and having a satisfaction peculiar to republicanism in the repetition of their titled names; or weighing and measuring the most unlikely and impossible things by the standards of "our country" and New York; or crunching the egg he has for lunch on Mount | Vesuvius, in the convulsive grasp belonging to that wild imagination which his friends have "scolded him about;" or going to the conversazioni of unsuspicious governors of cities, and calculating in his book the cost of the refresh

remembering unexampled sacrifices, and tests of sincerity without parallel, we can very well af ford to bear. It would certainly not be difficult to show that our officer fails to refute the American abolitionist party, (whose wisdom in any other respect we should be chary to affirm,) in his argument on their charge against the United States navy for a manifest reluctance to capture slaveships. The thing is on his lip, but not in his heart. He argues stoutly, but the tenor of his volume is against his argument. You see at once that, though stoppage of the slave trade was the colorable motive of the cruise, all the principal exertions discoverable in the course of it, were exclusively directed to the furtherance and protection of American commerce and American interests in Liberia.

As for what he says of England in this matter, it is a mere repetition of the foreign cant long prevalent, especially in France. It has always been a thing incomprehensible to our lively neighbors, that a money-getting, money-keeping country, should have spent twenty millions upon an act of humanity. Even M. Thiers, though he cannot countenance the dark Machiavellian charges of his journalist friends on this head, thinks it decent in the fourth volume of his history, (just issued in Mr. Colburn's authorized translation,) to exclaim, with a self-satisfied chuckle, that English slave emancipation has proved "a total failure!"

Yet even on this question of slavery-so difficult for any American to approach without the strongest prejudices that birth and education can implant-the author of this lively and well-writ ten book does not wholly lose the pervading frank

ness and sailor-like manliness of his character. | atre. Suppose him resorting to church, to worObserve his confession. ship the Creator of all men. What is the im"When the white man sets his foot on the pression that would be most bitterly conveyed to shore of Africa, he finds it necessary to throw off him in all these places? Why, that there may be his former prejudices. For my own part, I have tolerance or hope for any kind of iniquity in the dined at the tables of many colored men in Libe-states of free America, but that of a colored skin. ria, have entertained them on shipboard, worship- He would be followed by a savage and coldped with them at church; walked, rode, and as- blooded proscription, which has no limit, no end. sociated with them, as equal with equal, if not as He would see it in the gaol and in the hospital: friend with friend. Were I to meet those men in and it would follow him to the grave. Well may my own town, and among my own relatives, I our intelligent officer call it "sad" indeed. would treat them kindly and hospitably, as they The principal topics of the journal comprise have treated me. My position would give me sketches of the Canaries, the Cape de Verds, Liconfidence to do so. But, in another city, where beria, Madeira, Sierra Leone, Cape Coast, and I might be known to few, should I follow the dic- other localities of interest on the western side. tates of my head and heart, and there treat these The cruise lasted some year and a half; and the colored men as brethren and equals, it would im- cruising ground, we need hardly remind any ply the exercise of greater moral courage than I reader of the truest history on record, embraced have ever been conscious of possessing. This is the very track of that most famous of all the navisad; but it shows forcibly what the colored race gators, Captain Robinson Crusoe, when he went have to struggle against in America, and how vast trading for ivory, gold dust, and slaves-in no an advantage is gained by removing them to an- fear of anti-piratical ships of war, American or other soil.' English.

He goes further in another passage of his journal, and describes his having found, in a man of color, one of the shrewdest, most active, and most agreeable of Liberian colonists. This was Colonel Hicks: thus described.

"Once a slave in Kentucky, and afterwards in New Orleans, he is now a commission merchant in Monrovia, doing a business worth four or five thousand dollars per annum. Writing an elegant hand, he uses this accomplishment to the best advantage by inditing letters, on all occasions, to those who can give him business. If a French vessel shows her flag in the harbor, the colonel's krooman takes a letter to the master, written in his native language. If an American man-of-war, he writes in English, offering his services, and naming some person as his intimate friend, who will probably be known on board. Then he is so hospitable, and his house always so neat, and his table so good-his lady, moreover, is such a friendly, pleasant-tempered person, and so goodlooking, into the bargain-that it is really a fortunate day for the stranger in Liberia, when he makes the acquaintance of Colonel and Mrs. Hicks. Every day, after the business of the morning is concluded, the colonel dresses for dinner, which appears upon the table at three o'clock. He presides with genuine elegance and taste: his stories are good and his quotations amusing. To be sure, he occasionally commits little mistakes, such, for instance, as speaking of America as his alma mater; but, on the whole, even without any allowance for a defective education, he appears wonderfully well. One circumstance is too indicative of strong sense, as well as good taste, not to be mentioned ;-he is not ashamed of his color, but speaks of it without constraint, and without effort. Most colored men avoid alluding to their hue, thus betraying a morbid sensibility on the point, as if it were a disgraceful and afflictive dispensation. Altogether the colonel and his lady make many friends, and are as apparently happy, and as truly respectable, as any couple here or elsewhere.'

From the many curious and graphic notices of native customs and character on the Liberian coast, we select the following.

"It is to be desired that some missionary should give an account of the degree and kind of natural religion among the native tribes. Their belief in the efficacy of sassy-wood to discover guilt or innocence, indicates a faith in an invisible Equity. Some of them, however, select the most ridiculous of animals, the monkey, as their visible symbol of the Deity; or, as appears more probable, they stand in spiritual awe of him, from an idea that the souls of the dead are again embodied in this shape. Under this impression, they pay a kind of worship to the monkey, and never kill him near a burial-place; and though, in other situations, they kill and eat him, they endeavor to propitiate his favor by respectful language, and the use of charms. Other natives, in the neighborhood of Gaboon, worship the shark, and throw slaves to him to be devoured.

"On the whole, their morality is superior to their religion-at least, as between members of the same tribe-although they seem scarcely to acknowledge_moral obligations in respect to strangers. Their landmarks, for instance, are held sacred among the individuals of a tribe. A father takes his son, and points out the 'stake and stones' which mark the boundary between him and his neighbor. There needs no other registry. Land passes from sire to son, and is sold and bought with as undisputed and secure a title as all our deeds and formalities can establish. But, between different tribes, wars frequently arise on disputed boundary questions, and in consequence of encroachments made by either party. Land-palavers' and 'Woman-palavers' are the great causes of war. Veracity seems to be the virtue most indiscriminately practised, as well towards the stranger as the brother. The natives are cautious as to the accuracy of the stories which they promulgate, and seldom make a stronger asseveration than I tink he be true!' Yet their consciences do not shrink from the Now if this hospitable, able, and excellent citi-use of falsehood and artifice, where these appear zen were to present himself in New York, what expedient. would be his reception? Suppose him driving as "The natives are a matter of course to the best hotel. Suppose tages of education. him tendering his money at the box-door of a the- their children in the

not insensible to the advanThey are fond of having families of colonists, where