of all the rest. We speak of the good or the great;—and all are either the one or the other, who, with some vices, possess any strong and distinguishing virtues. But to have such large sympathies, there must be knowledge; and to have knowledge, we must scatter to the winds that visit us from afar, all such of our home-born and home-bred prejudices and bigotries as blind us to the perception of the same qualities in which we find our own pride and delight, when they exist in novel forms and combinations and habits in the character of the natives of other isles or continents, whether of alien, or of our own blood. If alien, to do so may be more difficult; if our own, not to do so is more mean-or base—or wicked; now we are brought to the point Scotchmen suffer themselves to be divided in soul, more than by seas, from their brethren the Americans-by the sullen swell or angry billows of animosity and hatred, more perilous far than all the storms that sweep the bosom of the wide Atlantic?

and

shall Englishmen and

We are the children of one mother. Not merely of old mother Earth, though in all cases that consideration should be sufficient to inspire mutual love into the hearts of her offspring; but of the Island of the Enlightened Free and never shall we believe that great nations can help loving one another, who exult in the glory of the same origin. Many passions may burn in their hearts, as they follow the career assigned them by fate, that shall seem to set them at war. Jealously may they regard one another in the pride of their ambition. Should their mightier interests clash, fierce will be the conflict. But if these may be pursued and preserved in peace, there will be a grandeur in the guarded calm with which they regard each other's power; and mutual pride, we may be well assured, in mutual prosperity. They-our colonists-thought themselves oppressed, enslaved, and they resolved to be free. We resolved to put them down as rebels. We fought and they conquered. We were met by our own might-and need Old England be ashamed that New England triumphed? They grudged not afterwards-though they must have envied-our victories over our and Europe's foes, at Trafalgar, Talavera, and Waterloo. Ask them, the Americans, what nation of the Old World they love best, and that stands highest in their proud esteem? The nation from whose

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loins they sprung. Alfred, Bruce, and Washington, were our three great deliverers.

There is great grandeur in the origin of the civil polity of the Americans-in its sudden and strong establishment; and it is destined, we doubt not, to long duration, and a vast accumulation of power-a boundless empire.

The growth of the human race, in the course of nature, shows us first a family, then a tribe consisting of many kin dred families, then a nation consisting of many kindred tribes. We find in the world several nations spread to a considerable extent by this natural diffusion; but in that case, the degree of union among the different tribes seems very loose, and not sufficient to prevent internal wars. Thus in Europe, in its primitive state, the Celtic, the German, and the Sclavonic nations, have extended to great numbers, occupying wide countries; and the old remembrances of consanguinity, marked in speech, and in external appearance, with some community of usages, has maintained a loose union among them. In Asia, some of the great Tartar nations, and the Arabs also, offer similar examples, having remained till this day free from admixture of blood. These show how the traces of the primitive origination of political society may remain indelibly impressed upon it, through the longest succession of time.

But to form larger, and yet stronger cemented states, other principles have been necessary, and have been employed by nature-chiefly these two, voluntary Confederacy under a common head, and Conquest.

Of the permanent states that have been formed at any time by voluntary Confederacy, the examples are not numerous, though some of them are not without splendour in the history of the world. In Italy, the Etrurian state appears to have been so formed, and it made great progress in early civilisation. Its union, too, was of considerable duration. Among the Greeks we find different occasional leagues, but none that could be called durable, except the union of the twelve Ionic cities in Asiatic Greece, a defensive league which was managed by a diet of deputies from the different towns. This, however, could not be said to constitute a state or community, since each remained governed by its own independent laws. The Amphictyonic Council, in which the delegates of

the principal states of Greece itself met to deliberate on questions of common interest, may indeed be considered as such a union, but of an imperfect kind. It showed a tendency to such combination, and how strongly the sense of a certain natural bond of union remains among those who still retain in language and usages the evidence of ancient consanguinity, since Greece, split into a hundred states, and divided by restless and fierce hostilities, still acknowledged herself as one whole; still reverenced that union which had been indelibly impressed upon her by the hand of nature. Among the leagues formed for temporary purposes, but which still bear evidence to the strongly-felt recognition of a natural union not to be abolished, must not be forgotten that which guarded her liberty and her rising glories, and which, alike by its own heroic splendour, and by the great deliverance it wrought, can never be separated from the remembrance of her deathless renown, that warlike league of peace which purified with the blood of her invaders the soil which their feet had polluted, when the spear of liberty daunted barbaric hosts, and earth and sea, spread with the slain of his routed nations, justified the prophetic tears of the Persian king.

In modern Europe there are some instances of such unions by voluntary compact, which are remarkable as having given birth to states firmly knit, and of long endurance; though not of great magnitude. Such was the Confederacy of the Cantons of Switzerland; a league, in the first instance, of defence and deliverance, and which for centuries was as sacredly maintained as it was heroically begun. The State of the United Provinces was such a league; giving rise to a well-cemented political community, which, on different accounts, has made itself a name among the nations of Europe. The Empire of Germany is to be considered as the most illustrious example known to us of such an union; yet its history shows that that union, as it was more extended, was less strong. But look now at that part of America which was colonised from this country, offering a magnificent instance, to be distinguished from all others, of a defensive league terminating in the establishment of a glorious confederated State. If it should be able permanently to maintain its union (which we do not doubt), it will show that, in advanced civilisation, it is possible for man to effect by deliberate political prudence

that object which, in early ages, nature has accomplished by far more violent means, of which the most cruel is conquest -the establishment of extensive and well-united States.

That a great nation thus arising should have established a very different form of government indeed, from that under which its "Pilgrim Fathers" and their ancestors had lived, was inevitable; and much modified, doubtless, must now be the original European character of the race by the influence of the spirit of all its new institutions. But its essence is the same ; and the freedom enjoyed by the citizens of that young Republic is to our eyes nearly identical with that in which we have so long gloried with permitted pride under an old Monarchy. Ours may be violently destroyed by sudden revolution; theirs may by slower change be gradually subdued; but true patriots in both great lands would be equally averse, we think, to dismiss from remembrance the manner in which arose each majestic edifice of power, and fear that any other innovation than that of nature and time might prove, in the event, irremediable ruin and total overthrow.

The Americans wonder, we know, at the infatuation of our rulers; nor, devoted as they are to their own form of government, can the more enlightened and generous among them help feeling sorrow to see the danger that threatens ours. This conviction, which they have not hesitated to confess, proves their sympathy with our love and pride in our own constitution, and that there is a community of highest feeling, in spite of the opposite nature of our politics, among the most enlightened lovers of their country, on the opposite shores of the Atlantic, on whose waters now meet in amity their saluting sails. May that amity be never broken nor disturbed; and by what other means may it be so strongly and sacredly preserved and secured, as by the mutual interchange and encouragement of all those pure and high thoughts— those "fancies chaste and noble," which genius brings to light into one common literature, eloquent in the same speech that, for so many centuries, has been made glorious by the loftiest conceptions of the greatest of the children of men? No treaties of peace so sacred as those ratified in a common tongue; and the tongue we speak, already known more widely over the world than any other (we do not include the Chinese),

is manifestly destined to communicate Christianity to the uttermost parts of the earth.

The treasures of our literature have been widely spread, and are every year spreading more widely over America; and theirs is winning its way among us, and indeed all over Europe. It is delightful to see how the spirit of ours is everywhere interfused through theirs, without overpowering that originality of thought and sentiment which must belong to the mind of a young people, but which, among those who own a common origin, is felt rather by indescribable differences in the cast and colour of the imagery employed, than discerned in any peculiar forms or moulds in which the compositions are cast.

In political, in moral, and in physical science, the Americans have done as much as could have been reasonably expected from a people earnestly engaged, with all their powers and passions, in constituting themselves into one of the great communities of civilised men. Of every other people the progress has been slow to any considerable height of power and extent of dominion; and imagination accompanying them all the way from obscurity to splendour, a literature has always grown up along with their growing strength, and sometimes its excellence has been consummate, before the character of their civil polity had been consolidated, or settled down into the steadfastness belonging to the maturity of its might. But soon as her limbs were free to move obedient to her own will alone, America was at once a great country; there are no great and distant eras in her history, all connected together by traditionary memories embalmed in the voice of song. Her poets had to succeed her statesmen, and her orators, and her warriors; and their reign is only about to begin. The records of the nation are short but bright; and their destinies must be farther unrolled by time, ere bards be born to consecrate, in lyric or epic poetry, the events imagination loves. Now, her poets must be inspired by Hope rather than by Memory, who was held of old to be Mother of the Muses. They must look forward to the future, not backward to the past; and the soul of genius from that mystic clime may be met by the airs of inspiration. True, that the history of the human race lies open before them, as before the poets of other lands; but genius