The Judge, however, is by no means singular among his countrymen in the abuse so lavishly bestowed on us. Without any design of inflicting such a torment, the Quarterly would seem to act as a blister on some of our thin-skinned brethren. A good-natured joke is construed into a sneer; salutary advice into insult; the mention of some peculiar trait of national character, into ridicule; yet, with all their abuse and hatred, they read and reprint us. God knows this country has little cause to be satisfied with the conduct of America; she has taken every occasion to injure our commerce, (as we have shown in our last Number,) without benefiting her own; and her unjust and ungenerous attempt to wound us at a time when maintaining a struggle for existence, is too recent not to be remembered. We have been told of forbearance and of endeavours to conciliate the good will of the Americans. We cannot think there has been any want of forbearance on the part of England; but while every American publication almost teems with abuse of this country, it appears to us that we might as soon expect to conciliate one of the Judge's rattlesnakes as the partisans of such men as Adams and Clay, whose hatred towards England is notorious, and to whose sect or party the honourable Judge Hall evidently belongs. This judicial blockhead, indeed, goes out of his way to make his silly and impertinent sneers at Englishmen. The Irish, Dutch, and French, he says, amalgamate easily with our people, adopt our habits, and live happily among us. But not so John Bull.' We are exceedingly glad to hear it. Then John, it seems, ‘has an odd propensity for quizzing the natives, and many a box on the ear and tweak of the nose this may cost the poor gentleman on his hapless way; till he finds out at last that it is just as foolish to meddle with the folks on shore, as to be fingering about their striped bunting" at sea.' In the same style is the following:'There is no people in the world whose national character is better defined or more strongly marked than our own. If the European theory on this subject be correct, is it not a little strange that our Yankee tars, whether on board of a frigate or a privateer, should always happen to play the same game, when they come athwart an Englishman? Is it not a little singular, that Brown in the North, and Jackson in the South, who I suspect never saw each other in their lives, should always happen to handle Lord Wellington's veterans exactly after the same fashion? Accidents will happen in the best of families; but when an accident occurs in the same family repeatedly, we are apt to suspect that it runs in the blood.'-pp. 238, 239. Again, in commenting on the charge of national vanity' made by our brethren of the Edinburgh Review, he says:

66

6

If a foreigner, in passing through our country, grasps at every occasion to make invidious comparisons, sneering at its population,

manners,

manners, and institutions, and extolling those of his own native land, nothing is said of national vanity. When it was determined in England to tear the "striped bunting" from the mast-heads of our " firbuilt frigates, " and to "6 sweep the Yankee cock-boats from the ocean," no national vanity was displayed at all; when the very Review in question tells us that England is the bulwark of religion, the arbiter of the fates of kingdoms, the last refuge of freedom, there is no national vanity in the business-not a spice. But if a plain backwoodsman ventures to praise his own country, because he finds all his wants supplied, and his rights defended, while he is not pestered with tax-gatherers and excisemen; is not devoured by fox-hunting priests, pensioners, and paupers; sees no dragoons galloping about his cottage, and is allowed to vote for whom he pleases to represent him—all of which he has good reason to believe is ordered differently in another country-this is a " disgusting display of national vanity." If he ventures to exhibit a shattered limb, or a breast covered with scars, and to tell that he received these honourable marks in defence of his native land, on an occasion when the "best troops in the world" fled before the valour of undisciplined freemen, led by a Jackson* or a Brown, this is very disgusting.'-pp. 120, 121.

The hero of New Orleans' is now at the top of the tree, but how long he may maintain his elevated situation, against the intrigues of the Clays and the Adamses, is another question. The American statesman is but born to die' and be forgotten. The

* What the exploits of this

6

'General Jackson,

Whom the English turned their backs on,'

It

The

may have been in his bloody conflicts' with the native Indians, we profess not to know; but we do know that his conduct at New Orleans, for which he has been so belauded, was not such as, in the English army, would have promoted the captain of a company to a majority. On the approach of the 85th regiment,' says Major-General Keane, to the point of attack, the enemy, favoured by the darkness of the night, concealed themselves under a high fence which separated the fields, and calling to the men as friends, under pretence of being part of our own force, offered to assist them in getting over, which was no sooner accomplished than the 85th found itself in the midst of very superior numbers, who, discovering themselves, called on the regiment immediately to surrender. The answer was an instantaneous attack; a more extraordinary conflict has perhaps never occurred, absolutely hand to hand, both officers and men. terminated in the repulse of the enemy, with the capture of thirty prisoners. A similar finesse was attempted with the 95th regiment, which met the same treatment.' enemy thus repulsed, collected a large columu, and was advancing towards our centre, but on Colonel Dale endeavouring to execute his orders to move forward and use the bayonet, the crafty enemy,' says the General, would not meet him, seeing the steadiness of bis small body, gave it a heavy fire, and quickly retired.' The enemy now collected the whole of his force to make a last effort, but Colonel Thornton, moving forwards with a firm determination of charging, 'appalled the enemy, who, from the lesson he had received on the same ground in the early part of the evening, thought it prudent to retire, and did not again dare to advance. From the best information I can obtain, the enemy's force amounted to five thousand men, and was commanded by Major-General Jackson-And from this time to the day when our army thought fit to retire unmolested from the swamps into which they never ought to have gone, the hero of New Orleans' never showed himself in the field, but kept behind his entrenchments. In this we have no doubt he acted prudently, but not in any way to entitle him to the title of hero.' Monroes,

Monroes, and Madisons, and Jeffersons, are sunk into the common herd; and the memory of Washington will probably be nearly extinct before the present century expires. His Honour the Judge, with his usual blundering, has unintentionally shown that the common vice of all democracies, modern as well as ancient, is neglect, indifference, and ingratitude towards those who have done them the best service; and although he means to represent, as in duty bound, the government of the United States to be the best of all possible governments, and Illinois, with its lost creeks,' 'dismal swamps,' cane brakes,' and mud bottoms,' the best of states, yet, with the philosophical nonchalance of Pangloss, he admits that men will die of autumnal fevers in the one, and in poverty and neglect from the ingratitude of the other. All, however, goes well in this best of countries, as is proved, among many other instances, in that of General Neville, who, like the Chevalier Bayard,' of whom the Judge has heard something, is said by him to have had a heart above fear, and an integrity without reproach;' who thought, felt, and acted with the pride, the enthusiasm, and the energy of a soldier;' who was an active citizen, a liberal promoter of all public improvements, and a careful guardian of the rights of his fellow-citizensthe friend of Washington and Hamilton. This man, who had doue great service in the revolution, and who in prosperity was idolized, was in adversity forsaken;' and not only so, but 'stripped in his old age of an office on which he depended for subsistence;' and thus robbed and ruined, this good and useful man retired into Pennsylvania, where he lived in indigence and died in obscurity.' The fate of another ́ revolutionary leader, General St. Clair, furnishes another striking example of democratical ingratitude. An American force, under this officer, had been defeated in the woods and wilderness of the Ohio by the savages, as the Honourable Judge Hall invariably calls the native Indians. • He was tried, admired, blamed, applauded, and condemned !'

'The distinguished reputation gained by General St. Clair in the revolutionary war was insufficient to sustain him under this reverse of fortune. His popularity declined, his abilities were doubted, and his services no longer required. He retired to an obscure residence among the mountains of Pennsylvania. Here, in the most abject poverty, in a miserable cabin, upon a sterile and dreary waste, among rocks and precipices, (fit emblems of his career!) he dragged out a wretched existence, visited only by his sorrows, except when a solitary traveller, impelled by curiosity to witness that which one of the ancients has pronounced to be a noble spectacle, penetrated the intricacies of the Laurel Mountain, to behold a great man in adversity. The general who had commanded armies, the governor who had ruled a province, the patriot who had nobly dared in the noblest of

causes,

causes, endured these calamities in the country which had witnessed his deeds, and reaped the harvest of his exertions. He endured them without a friend to soften his bitterness, without a domestic to administer to his wants. Such is the fate of an unsuccessful leader, over whose fate the passage of a single cloud obscures the brilliance of a long career of glory, and is followed by ruin, darkness, and desolation!'-pp. 160, 161.

Judges, too, it seems, as well as Generals, are liable to the neglect and ingratitude of the rulers of republican states. Judge Addison, with a fine mind and great attainments; an accomplished scholar, great in theology as well as law, pursued a dignified course, equally serviceable to the country and honourable to himself;' and what was his reward?

'He became obnoxious to a dominant faction; was impeached, condemned, and hurled from a seat to which he had given dignity. Such are the effects of party spirit; its venom, like a poisonous miasm, pervades the whole atmosphere in which it is generated, and creates a pestilence which sweeps worth and worthlessness to a common grave. '

،

،

Our Judge, however, the honourable Judge Hall, has the consolation to know, that his predecessors in the western wilderness have been more fortunate. Steele Semple was a man of stupendous genius;' James Ross ، has few equals ;' and Brakenridge, 'the eccentric, highly-gifted Brakenridge, celebrated for his wit, his frolicsome propensities, and strange adventures,--who cracked his jokes at the bar, and on the bench of the Supreme Court, as freely as at his own fireside ;' and some half-dozen other ، droll fellows,' whose names are equally known to fame, exhibit,' we are told, a galaxy of eloquence and learning,' and shine with 'great brilliancy' on the bench and at the bar of Pittsburgh, in spite of her dingy aspect.' Whether the Honourable Judge Hall is destined to have his name enrolled among those worthies, and transferred into the same milky way,' which sheds so clear a light through the dingy atmosphere that hovers over this Birmingham of the back woods, time only can determine; but the impression which the perusal of these 'Letters from the West' has left on our minds, is, that, should his ambition lead him to aspire to a place in that brilliant circle, it will be only in the shape of an opaque nebula inter stellas minores.

.

Enough of this Judge Hall and the West.' Since we have been seduced into any allusion to the soreness of brother Jonathan under anything like criticism of the minora moralia, we shall venture to say one word more on that score in parting with this judicial luminary. How happens it that the Americans, those grand-souled equality people, are, five out of ten of them, such despicable tuft-hunters when they make their appearance in the old world?

ART.

ART. IV.-The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham. By Robert Surtees, Esq. 3 vols. Folio. Lond. 1816-1828.

TOR rough, nor barren, are the winding ways

NOR

Of hoar antiquity, but strewn with flowers-'

It

The poet who said this, gathered among those ways an ama ranthine wreath for himself. Mr. George Dyer* has expressed a similar opinion, very beautifully, in prose. It is no uncommon thing,' says he, to hear pursuits of this kind madet he subject of ridicule by men of fancy. What may not be so treated? But their importance and utility cannot be denied. is not, perhaps, desirable to see men of the first genius shooting with this bow, because their sinews are formed for essays more pleasing and illustrious. But the scope of the antiquary is still wide and large. To his patient toil and plodding perseverance, the chronologist, the biographer, the historian, and the poet, stand eminently indebted; and works the most splendid in form, and which are constructed for the admiration of posterity, rise out of ordinary documents and researches, which may appear unpromising and trifling. Who can calculate on the consequence of a single date, sometimes to an individual, sometimes to a family, and sometimes even to the public?-xapis opinion onde. Monuments, and their inscriptions, considered, in another point of view, as efforts of expiring mortality, which sighs for a little remembrance beyond the grave; or as tributes of surviving relatives and friends, who labour to preserve a name which they wish not to be quite obliterated, do but favour a wish natural to the human hearta desire incident to the best and purest part of our species. Under the greatest debility of his frame, and amidst even a wearisomeness of existence, man still feels the tender and endearing tie of life, and is solicitous not to be forgotten; and he who preserves a monument from mouldering into ruin-who records a name, or who rescues an inscription that is nearly effaced, humours a useful propensity, the universal passion; and he is entitled, in his turn, not to be overlooked as a trifler, or as a labourer about nothing-operare nihil agendo.'

Even the humblest labourers among the ruins of time, such as the Old Mortalitys of the Gentleman's Magazine, are entitled to the respectful consideration which Mr. Dyer thus claims for them. But the local historian is sure of obtaining the gratitude of posterity, if he perform his task with faithful diligence: his name becomes far more intimately and lastingly connected with the city or district, the memorials of which he has collected, than that of any personage, however illustrious, who derives his title from it; and he erects for himself a more durable monument in

*History of Cambridge, vol. i., pp. 27, 28.

perishable