Puslapio vaizdai
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From the Creation of the World to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century. By the late Hon. ALEX. FRAZIER TYTLER, Lord Woodhouselee, Senator of the College of Justice, and Lord Commissioner of Justiciary in Scotland, and formerly Professor of Civil History and Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the University of Edinburgh.

This Work contains the whole course of Lectures on Universal History, delivered by the Professor, while engaged in the University of Edinburgh, and has been for many years and now is a text-book in the first Universities of both countries, and in all probability will be handed down to the end of time, as the most interesting and useful work on Universal History for the time it embraces, extant.

The chief characterizing feature of the plan of the author is, that he rejects the popular style of historians of arranging general history according to certain epochs or eras, and proceeds to give the history of a nation or people through a long succession of years, digressing only when the history of some other nation may be so interwoven with the one under consideration as to become inseparable. In this way the author gives the history of the world from the creation, compiled from the best authorities, with great simplicity and perspicuity; and his work cannot fail to recommend itself to the professional man, the student, and the general reader.

The present edition is comprised in two handsomely printed octavo volumes of 1000 pages, neatly bound, and is offered at the low price of Three Dollars. A liberal discount made to those buying to sell again, or to teachers buying for their schools. All orders by mail, post-paid, promptly attended to.

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MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW.

NO. I. DECEMBER, 1847.

TO THE PUBLIC.

THE American people are fast opening their own destiny. Their material basis is of such extent that no folly of man can quite subvert it; for the territory is a considerable fraction of the planet, and the population neither loath nor inexpert to use their advantages. Add, that this energetic race derive an unprecedented material power from the new arts, from the expansions effected by public schools, cheap postage, and a cheap press, from the telescope, the telegraph, the railroad, steamship, steamferry, steammill, from domestic architecture, chemical agriculture, from ventilation, from ice, ether, caoutchouc, and innumerable inventions and manufactures.

A scholar who has been reading of the fabulous magnificence of Assyria and Persia, of Rome and Constantinople, leaves his library, and takes his seat in a rail-car, where he is importuned by newsboys with journals still wet from Liverpool and Havre, with telegraphic despatches not yet fifty minutes old from Buffalo and Cincinnati. At the screams of the steam-whistle, the train quits city and suburbs, darts away into the interior,- drops every man at his estate as it whirls along, and shows our traveller what tens of thousands of powerful and weaponed men, science-armed and society-armed, sit at large in this ample region, obscure from their numbers and the extent of the domain. He reflects on the power

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which each of these plain republicans can employ; how far these chains of intercourse and travel reach, interlock, and ramify; what levers, what pumps, what exhaustive analyses are applied to nature for the benefit of masses of men. Then he exclaims, What a negro-fine royalty is that of Jamschid and Solomon! What a substantial sovereignty does my townsman possess! A man who has a hundred dollars to dispose of, a hundred dollars over his bread, is rich beyond the dreams of the Caesars.

Keep our eyes as long as we can on this picture, we cannot stave off the ulterior question, the famous question of Cineas to Pyrrhus, the WHERETO of all this power and population, these surveys and inventions, this taxing and tabulating, millprivilege, roads, and mines. The aspect this country presents is a certain maniacal activity, an immense apparatus of cunning machinery which turns out, at last, some Nuremberg toys. Has it generated, as great interests do, any intellectual power? Where are the works of the imagination-the surest test of a national genius? At least as far as the purpose and genius of America is yet reported in any book, it is a sterility, and no genius.

One would say, there is nothing colossal in the country but its geography and its material activities; that the moral and intellectual effects are not on the same scale with the trade and production. There is no speech heard but that of auctioneers, newsboys, and the caucus. Where is the great breath of the New World, the voice of aboriginal nations opening new eras with hymns of lofty cheer? Our books and fine arts are imitations; there is a fatal incuriosity and disinclination in our educated men to new studies, and the interrogation of nature. We have taste, critical talent, good professors, good commentators, but a lack of male energy.

What more serious calamity can befall a people than a constitutional dulness and limitation? The moral influence of the intellect is wanting. We hearken in vain for any profound

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