common humanity, a triumphant reply or refutation to any of the grounds of defence taken by anti-abolitionists. For this reason alone his name and his efforts should be kept as much as possible before the eyes of the world. Such has been our wish and endeavour, which may be sufficient to excuse the present recurrence to a theme which has frequently engaged us. That theme, however, is not yet stale; nay, we often hear, even in England, doubts uttered, and blame expressed, in relation to the Emancipation of the West India negroes; and sad forebodings about its commercial results; so that Dr. Channing's tact has appeared opportunely, and may not have unprofitably occupied us.

The latter part of the tract, which suggests as a practical remedy for the slave system of the American States, that those which are free ought to refuse to render up to the owners runaway slaves, who have escaped into their territories, we shall not enter upon. The remedy appears to us inadequate, to be an infringement of the federal constitution, and to be fraught with the elements of disunion and civil war. At any rate the suggestion and the manner in which it is fenced as well as urged, together with the appreciation of various principles and duties of a moral kind, which it pre-supposes, oblige us to feel that slavery in the American Union is beset with so many difficulties and dangers, that it may well make the stoutest quake, the most hopeful doubt, and the wisest despair.

But although we have doubts of the practical efficacy of Dr. Channing's remedy, and while we are sensible of the splendid efforts he has persevered in making in the cause of enlightened liberty and negro freedom, let us not lose any opportunity of supporting the great principles and ends he has in view by kindred, collateral, or neutral evidence and argument that may come before us. We therefore for a minute or two call attention to a volume of which we have only had a glimpse at the hour we write, entitled "Slavery and the Internal Slave-trade in the United States of North America; being Replies to Questions transmitted by the Committe of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society;" a celebrated meeting of which took place in London, as our readers will remember, last summer. The Committee of that society, we now learn, transmitted to America a series of queries upon the subject of slavery in that country, and have obtained a corresponding category of answers from the American Anti-Slavery Society,-the whole forming the volume to which we refer.

We shall not enumerate the queries, much less copy their terms; but mention generally that they go to the core of the evil, and also point to various propounded or probable schemes for the abolition of the enormity. A considerable number of the questions are of a statistical character, such as those which regard the amount of slaves, the import and the internal trade, the social and domestic

condition of those in bondage, the means of their moral and religious education, the state of public opinion concerning the system, its effects upon the slave-owning members of the community, the share which the Free States have in upholding it, what measures should be adopted as the most likely means towards its abolition, and questions akin to these.

To many of these queries the answers are not only plain, clear and striking, but temperate, and fraught with evidences of authenticity and genuine principle; for although coming from the friends of the coloured people and the advocates of freedom, they are not to be looked upon with presumptive suspicion, unless things good and bad, praiseworthy and vile, ennobling and enslaving, are to be regarded, before a hearing, with equal favour.

We might adduce some of the strongest and most startling circumstances from the present volume, that we have ever been made acquainted with, to illustrate the deplorable influence of the slave system upon the morals of the owners and the community at large. But as our notice of the volume has been brief and general, so our extracts from it must be sparing. We therefore quote two passages, on account of their indicative character, and for the broad light which they shed or point to. The first is in these significant and sweeping terms, in answer to a question relative to a law of registration: "Such a law, if faithfully and vigorously executed, would doubtless accomplish much; but we have no idea that any such law could be passed at present in the United States, or if passed, that it would be faithfully enforced. There is so little true respect for the principles of liberty in the nation, and so little just appreciation of human rights, that a law of this kind could neither be passed nor properly executed."

Dr. Channing has said that there is a plentiful race of politicians among his countrymen, but a woful want of real statesmen; and the present volume also informs us that there is no lack of loud professors of religion in the slave-holding states, although among these canting fellows,-Methodists and other zealots,-the cruelest masters and planters are to be found. So much for the disastrous influence over all, even those whom one would suppose the farthest removed from the brutalizing effects of slavery, upon master as well as bondsman. We now quote an illustration that will tell with double effect, because it has no exaggeration about it, but addresses itself to our better sympathies.

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George and Jane were inhabitants of the same village in the State of Kentucky, but belonged to different masters. They enjoyed in an unusual degree the confidence of their respective owners,' who were men of the highest respectability in the community. George was the head man in his master's tannery; and Jane was the principal servant in her owner's establishment, the first inn in the village. They had been married for a

number of years, and had, both among Blacks and Whites, the credit of uncommon conjugal faithfulness. Both were professedly pious, and possessed more than ordinary education for slaves, being able to read fluently. Having lighter work and more indulgent masters than usually fell to the lot of slaves, they knew comparatively little of the rigours of bondage. Sunday was uniformly at their own disposal, and mostly spent in each other's society. Every evening, the work of the day being finished, George was a punctual visitant at his wife's room. For many years they lived in unbroken union, anticipating no fiery trials of violent sunderings. It is true, they frequently witnessed the separations of husbands and wives, as the souldrivers' went round upon their annual circuits of horror and desolation; but they felt assured that their masters prized them too highly to sell them to the traders.

"But a dire calamity was preparing for them; and when finally it broke, with the suddenness of a summer's bolt upon them, it scattered all their social joys for ever. Jane's master had become embarrassed in his pecuniary affairs, and found it absolutely necessary to change his residence. He resolved upon going to the distant State of Missouri. The preparations for removal were almost completed before Jane was informed of the design; and with that information she also learned the determination of her master to take her along with him. In consternation, she flew with the intelligence to her husband. Without a moment's delay, they together hastened to the wife's 'owner,' and prostrating themselves before him, besought that he would allow Jane to find herself a new master in the village. He finally yielded to their entreaties and tears, but set such an extravagant price upon her, that they felt little hope of finding any person who would be willing to give it. They applied first to George's master: he was willing to buy Jane, but objected to her master's terms. Applications were made to several other citizens, all of whom had the same objection, the exorbitant price. They besought the master to consent to take less, but he was inexorable; consequently the desired change of ownership could not be effected."

Now compare Emancipation with Slavery,-the British West India colonies with the American slave-holding States.

AKT. XIII.—The Land of Burns: a Series of Landscapes rendered classical by the Writings of the Scottish Poet. Parts XXI., XXII., XXIII. Glasgow: Blackie and Son.

"THE Land of Burns" presents a series of the "banks and braes," of the localities identified with the Life and Writings of the greatest poet that ever Scotland produced, embracing some of the sweetest and most picturesque scenery of the country. The pictorial illustrations are amongst the most beautiful and characteristic that have ever yet appeared in works of this class, whether delineating scenes at home or abroad. Portraits of the poet and other persons, connected with him by personal intimacy or by association with his muse, are also introduced; while the letter-press descriptions which accompany the Engravings have been written by Robert Chambers,

so distinguished for his fine and fresh appreciation of Scottish life and landscape; and the "Essay on the Genius and Character of Burns" has been furnished by Professor Wilson.

"The Land of Burns!" our father-land!-the poet-ploughman's birth-place, and the adjacent scenes being familiar to our early steps, the strong idiomatic Doric in which he sung, our vernacular tongue, our ancestors and neighbours, the men of sturdy stuff and breadth of character among whom his genius was fashioned and fed, whose stamp it received and returned with matchless fidelity and ideal power,- -what reminiscences do these few short words conjure up! what images convey! But what need of vague exclamation or blown bombast about glen or woodland,-lovely stream or foaming cataract, and Scotia's true-born sons, austere but social, with the western land's records of heroes, patriots, and martyrs, when the Professor has lavished his genial powers upon the Peasant Bard, and with prodigal wealth embalmed his memory and the glories of his inspiration? A poet of a foremost order, a maser critic, a great and a good man, has buckled on his armour, to see justice done to the noblest of his country's children; and what need we then to do more than cull liberally from this splendid monument to the genius. of the Poet and the character of the Man-a monument which sets Burns in a new and more just as well as more attractive light than was ever shed around his name by enthusiast or eulogist.

We have read many biographies of the Ayrshire poet, many bursts of eloquence, and verses gushing with sentiment in praise and wonder concerning him. Lives by Currie, Lockhart, Cunningham, and others, have been pondered by us with pride and delight; but yet never so unalloyed that we could say the picture was complete, that the man and the poet had been comprehended and fully penetrated; so that our conviction had come to be that it was in vain to essay the task, and preposterous to look for the fulfilment of it, when that task was to measure the depths, the dimensions, and flights of triumphant originality, and to point out and describe satisfactorily the developments in the course of its history, and its several achievements.

Now, however, we must confess that the utmost which we longed for, but had begun to despair of, has been accomplished; that by means of graphic literary notices and illustrative art, but especially by the Essayist's comments and delineations, fathomings and adjustments, we have Burns, his age, land, scenery, illuminated-the "Land" being not more imperishable than his name brought with life-like truth before us; so that he who wishes to study him truly and fairly, or to admire him wisely, will never be content without having drawn largely from the pictures and pages before us.

At a period in the history of genius and of poetry, and at a stage in the appreciation of Burns, when translation after translation of

his works is appearing in Germany, (for difficult as the dialect in which he writes must be to render into a foreign language, such is the universality of circulation to which the coinage of genius is destined, such the acceptance and understanding on the part of every son of Adam of a new and sterling thought issuing from any one man, that it is sure to find its way throughout the wide world), a work of the beauty and the merit of that of which we now so earnestly and honestly speak must be fondly welcomed in all lands; not only wherever a Scotchman may have planted himself, but wherever hearts are fresh and warm, or taste wholesome and healthy. We have now only to place before our readers, by extract and abstract, some of those large sentiments, comprehensive and characteristic views, and generous constructions which burst with magnificent profusion, and luminous eloquence from the Professor; who with assured ease and masterly skill groups together all that is significant about his subject, as the conscious reader finds all his fancies and recollections testify by charmed responses. What can be finer than the opening of the Essay?—

"Burns is by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the people, and lived and died in a humble condition. Indeed, no country in the world but Scotland, could have produced such a man; and he will be for ever regarded as the glorious representative of the genius of his country. He was born a poet, if ever man was, and to his native genius alone is owing the perpetuity of his fame. For he manifestly had never very deeply studied poetry as an art, nor reasoned much about its principles, nor looked abroad with the wide ken of intellect for objects and subjects on which to pour out his inspiration. The condition of the peasantry of Scotland, the happiest, perhaps, that providence ever allowed to the children of labour, was not surveyed and speculated on by him as the field of poetry, but as the field of his own existence; and he chronicled the events that passed there, not merely as food for his imagination as a poet, but as food for his heart as a man. Hence, when inspired to compose poetry, poetry came gushing up from the well of his human affections, and he had nothing more to do, than to pour it, like streams irrigating a meadow, in many a cheerful tide over the drooping flowers and fading verdure of life. Imbued with vivid perceptions, warm feelings, and strong passions, he sent his own existence into that of all things, animate and inanimate, around him ; and not an occurrence in hamlet, village, or town, atected in any way the happiness of the human heart, but roused as keen an interest in the soul of Burns, and as genial a sympathy, as if it had immediately concerned himself and his own individual welfare. Most other poets of rural life have looked on it through the aerial veil of imagination-often beautified, no doubt, by such partial concealment, and beaming with a misty softness more delicate than the truth. But Burns would not thus indulge his fancy where he had felt-felt so poignantly, all the agonies and all the transports of life. He looked around him, and when he saw the smoke of the cottage rising up quietly and unbroken to heaven, he knew, for he had seen and blessed it, the quiet joy and unbroken contentment that slept below; and when he