or one of the West-India islands, and it was covered with a table-cloth from St. Petersburg or Archangel. The tea was from China; the coffee from Java; the sugar from Cuba or Louisiana; the silver spoons from Mexico or Peru; the cups and saucers from England or France. Each of these articles was purchased by an exchange of other products the growth of our own or foreign countries- collected and distributed by a succession of voyages, often to the farthest corners of the globe. Without cultivating a rood of ground, we taste the richest fruits of every soil. Without stirring from our fireside, we collect on our tables the growth of every region. In the midst of winter, we are served with fruits that ripened in a tropical sun; and struggling monsters are dragged from the depths of the Pacific ocean, to lighten our dwellings."

We are glad to find such sentiments as the subjoined, enforced with earnest eloquence. The lecturer is speaking of the unworthy prejudice which has been suffered to obtain in the United States, against capital and capitalists. He is speaking of the progress, from infancy upward, of the whale trade of New-Bedford and Nantucket:

"The business has grown, until the ancient fishing-grounds have become the first stations on a modern whaling voyage; and capitals are now required sufficient to fit out a vessel for an absence of forty months, and a voyage of circumnavigation. Fifty thousand dollars are invested in a single vessel; she doubles Cape Horn, ranges from New South Shetland to the coasts of Japan, cruises in unexplored latitudes, stops for refreshment at islands before undiscovered, and on the basis perhaps of the capital of an individual house in New-Bedford or Nantucket, performs an exploit which, sixty or seventy years ago, was thought a great object to be effected by the resources of the British government. In this branch of business, a capital of twelve or fifteen millions of dollars is invested. Its object is to furnish a cheap and commodious light for our winter evenings. The capitalist, it is true, desires an adequate interest on his investment; but he can only get this by selling his oil at a price at which the public are able and willing to buy it. The 'overgrown capitalist' employed in this business, is an overgrown lamp-lighter. Before he can pocket his six per cent., he has trimmed the lamp of the cottager who borrows an hour from evening to complete her day's labor, and has lighted the taper of the pale and thought-worn student, who is 'outwatching the bear,' over some ancient volume."

Short-sighted persons have often inveighed, here and elsewhere, against the accumulations of capital, in the production of manufactures, carried on by machinery. Such have seen, with abundant foreboding, the shuttle drop from the fingers of the weaver, and fall into iron fingers that ply it faster; and the sailor furl his sail and lay down his oar, bidding 'a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings,' to bear him through the water, making the stormy sea his smooth highway. To such croaking economists, we commend the following unanswerable arguments:

"When we hear persons condemning accumulations of capital employed in manufactures, we cannot help saying to ourselves, is it possible that any rational man can desire to stop those busy wheels, to paralyze those iron arms, to arrest that falling stream, which works while it babbles? What is your object? Do you wish wholly to deprive society of the fruit of the industry of these inanimate but untiring laborers? Gr do you wish to lay on aching human shoulders the burdens which are so lightly borne by these patient metallic giants? Look at Lowell. Behold the palaces of her industry side by side with her churches and her school-houses, the long lines of her shops and warehouses, her streets filled with the comfortable abodes of an enterprising, industrious, and intelligent population. See her fiery Sampsons roaring along her railroad, with thirty laden cars in her train. Look at her watery Goliahs, not wielding a weaver's beam, like him of old, but giving motion to hundreds and thousands of spindles and looms. Twenty years ago, and two or three poor farms occupied the entire space within the boundaries of Lowell. Not more visibly, I had almost said not more rapidly, was the palace of Aladdin, in the Arabian tales, constructed by the genius of the lamp, than this noble city of the arts has been built by the genius of capital. This capital, it is true, seeks a moderate interest on the investment; but it is by furnishing to all who desire it, the cheapest garment ever worn by civilized man. To denounce the capital which has been the agent of this wonderful and beneficent creation, to wage war with a system which has spread and is spreading plenty throughout the country, what is it but to play in real life the part of the malignant sorcerer in the same eastern tale, who, potent only for mischief, utters the baleful spell which breaks the charm, heaves the mighty pillars of the palace from their foundation, converts the fruitful gardens back to their native sterility, and heaps the abedes of life and happiness with silent and desolate ruins ?"

The influences of commerce, in the past and present ages of the world, are admirably set forth in the annexed passage:

"When we contemplate the past, we see some of the most important phenomena in human history intimately-I had almost said mysteriously-connected with commerce. In the very dawn of civilization, the art of alphabetical writing sprang up among a commercial people. One can almost imagine that these wonderfully convenient elements were a kind of short-hand, which the Phoenician merchants, under the spur of necessity, contrived for keeping their accounts; for what could they have done with hieroglyphics of the Egyptian priesthood, applied to the practical purposes of a commerce which extended over the known world, and of which we have preserved to us such a curious and instructive description by the prophet Ezekiel? A thousand years later, and the same commercial race among whom this sublime invention had its origin, performed a not less glorious part as the champions of freedom.

"When the Macedonian madman commenced his crusade against Asia, the Phonicians opposed the only vigorous resistance to his march. The Tyrian merchants delayed him longer beneath the walls of their sea-girt city, than Darius at the head of all the armies of the East. In the succeeding centuries, when the dynasties established by Alexander were crumbling, and the Romans in turn took up the march of universal conquest and dominion, the commercial city of Carthage, the daughter of Tyre, afforded the most efficient check to their progress. But there was nowhere sufficient security for property in the old world, to form the basis of a permanent commercial prosperity. In the middle ages, the iron-yoke of the feudal system was broken by commerce. The emancipation of Europe from the detestable sway of the barons, began with the privileges granted to the cities. The wealth acquired in commerce afforded the first counterpoise to that of the fendal chiefs who monopolized the land, and in the space of century and a half, gave birth to a new civilization. In the west of Europe, the Hanse towns; in the east, the cities of Venice, Genoa, the ports of Sicily and Naples, Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn, begin to swarm with active crowds. The Mediterranean, deserted for nearly ten centuries, is covered with vessels. Merchants from the Adriatic explore the farthest east: silks, spices, gums, gold, are distributed from the Italian cities through Europe, and the dawn of a general revival breaks on the world. Nature, at this juncture, discloses another of those mighty mysteries, which man is permitted from age to age to read in her awful volume. As the fullness of time approaches for the new world to be found, it is discovered that a piece of steel may be so prepared, that it will point a steady index to the pole. After it had led the adventurers of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, to the utmost limits of the old world - from Iceland to the south of Africa- the immortal discoverer, with the snows and sorrows of near sixty years upon his head, but with the fire of immortal youth in his heart, placed himself under the guidance of the mysterious pilot, bravely followed its mute direction through the terrors and the dangers of the unknown sea, and called a new hemisphere into being. "It would be easy to connect with this discovery almost all the great events of modern history, and, still more, all the great movements of modern civilization. Even in the colonization of New-England, although more than almost any other human enterprise the offspring of the religious feeling, commercial adventure opened the way and furnished the means. As time rolled on, and events hastened to their consummation, commercial relations suggested the chief topics in the great controversy for liberty. The British Navigation Act was the original foundation of the colonial grievances. There was a constant struggle to break away from the limits of the monopoly imposed by the mother country. The American navigators could find no walls nor barriers on the face of the deep, and they were determined that paper and parchment should not shut up what God had thrown open. The moment the war of independence was over, the commercial enterprise of the country went forth like an uncaged eagle, who, having beaten himself almost to madness against the bars of his prison, rushes out at length to his native element, and exults as he bathes his undazzled eye in the sunbeam, or pillows his breast upon the storm. Our merchants were far from contenting themselves with treading obsequiously in the footsteps even of the great commercial nation from which we are descended. Ter: years had not elapsed from the close of the revolutionary war, before the infant commerce of America had struck out for herself a circuit in some respects broader and holder than that of England. Beside penetrating the remotest haunts of the commerce heretofore carried on by the trading nations of Europe- the recesses of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the White seas-she displayed the stars and the stripes in distant oceans, where the Lion and the Lilies never floated. She not only engaged with spirit in the trade with Hindostan and China, which had been thought to be beyond the grasp of individual capital and enterprise, but she explored new markets on islands and coasts before unapproached by modern commerce.'

In discussing the character of the commerce of Boston, Mr. EVERETT brings before his audience three successive historical and topographical pictures, as in the shifting

scenes of a diorama. In the first, the hearer is invited to go up with Governor WINTHROP to the heights of Charlestown, as yet without a name, on the day of his landing, the seventeenth of June, 1630. Landward, stretches a dismal forest; seaward, a waste of waters, unspotted with a sail, except that of his own ship. At the foot of the hill, are the cabins of two enterprising adventurers to a spot else untenanted by any child of civilization. The second picture is contemplated from the same eminence, one hundred and forty-five years later, on the seventeenth of June, 1775:

"A terrific scene of war rages on the top of the hill. Wait for a favorable moment, when the volumes of fiery smoke roll away, and over the masts of that sixty-gun ship, whose batteries are blazing upon the hill, you behold an ill-built town of about two thousand dwelling-houses, mostly of wood, with scarce any public buildings but eight or nine churches, the old State-house, and Faneuil Hall; Roxbury beyond, an insignificant village; a vacant marsh, in all the space now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, by Chelsea and East Boston; and beneath your feet the town of Charlestown, consisting in the morning of a line of about three hundred houses, wrapped in a sheet of flames at noon, and reduced at eventide to a heap of ashes."

From the state-house, in Boston, as from an observatory, the lecturer looks down upon the third scene; and very faithful and well-colored is the picture:

"As we look down from this lofty structure, we behold the third picture; a crowded, busy scene. We see beneath us a city containing eighty or ninety thousand inhabitants, and mainly built of brick and granite. Vessels cf every description are moored at the wharves. Long lines of commodious and even stately houses cover a space which, within the memory of man, was in a state of nature. Substantial blocks of warehouses and stores have forced their way to the channel. Faneuil Hall itself, the consecrated and unchangeable, has swelled to twice its original dimensions. Athenæums, hospitals, asylums, and infirmaries, adorn the streets. The school-house rears its modest front in every quarter of the city, and sixty or seventy churches attest that the children are content to walk in the good old ways of their fathers. Connected with the city by eight bridges, avenues, or ferries, you behold a range of towns most of them municipally distinct, but all of them in reality forming with Boston one vast metropolis, animated by one commercial life. Shading off from these, you see that most lovely back-ground, a succession of happy settlements, spotted with villas, farm-houses, and cottages; united to Boston by a constant intercourse; sustaining the capital from their fields and gardens, and prosperous in the reflux of the city's wealth. Of the social life included within this circuit, and of all that in times past has adorned and ennobled it, commercial industry has been an active element, and has exalted itself by its intimate association with every thing else we hold dear. Within this circuit, what memorials strike the eye; what recollections; what institutions; what patriotic treasures, and names that cannot die! There lie the canonized precincts of Lexington and Concord; there rise the sacred heights of Dorchester and Charlestown; there is Harvard, the an cient and venerable foster-child of public and private liberality in every part of the State; to whose existence Charlestown gave the first impulse, to whose growth and usefulness the opulence of Boston has at all times ministered with open hand. Still farther on than the eye can reach, four lines of communication by railroad and steam have within our own day united with the capital, by bands of iron, a still broader circuit of towns and villages. Hark to the voice of life and business which sounds along the lines! While we speak, one of them is shooting onward to the illimitable west, and all are uniting with the other kindred enterprises, to form one harmonious and prosperous whole, in which town and country, agriculture and manufactures, labor and capital, art and nature-wrought and compacted into one grand system are constantly gathering and diffusing, concentrating and radiating the economical, the social, the moral blessings of a liberal and diffusive commerce.

'In mere prosperity and the wealth it diffuses, there is no ground for moral approbation; though I believe in any long period of time it will be found that those communities only are signally prosperous where virtuous principle is revered as the rule of conduct. It is the chief glory of our commercial community, that the old standard of morals is still kept up; that industry and frugality are still held in honorable repute; that the rage for speculation has not eaten out the vitals of character, and that lucky fraud, though plated stiff with ill-gotten treasure, dare not yet lift up its bold, unblushing face in the presence of the humblest man, who eats the bread of honest industry."

This address is beautifully printed, as well as the poem which accompanies it, which we shall embrace an early opportunity to notice.

DEMONSTRATION OF THE TRUTH OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. BY ALEXANDER KEITH, D. D., Author of the 'Evidence of Prophecy,' etc. In one volume. pp. 329. NewYork: HARPER AND BROTHERS.

We have given this book but a hasty and unsatisfactory perusal; yet we have seen that it contains much valuable information and exact learning. The great defect, as it appears to us, of this and other similar defences of Christianity, is, that they do not see the objections from a right point of view. Bad men, who doubt the truth of the gospel, doubt it, we cannot but think, from 'an evil heart of unbelief;' and are not to be reached by arguments aimed at the head. Good men, who reject portions of the gospel, (and assuredly there have been such,) are not to be treated with contempt, nor are their objections to be met cavalierly. Their difficulties lie beyond the depths of common observation. Treatises upon the possibility of miracles, or the integrity of the canon, or the testimony of antiquity, have little weight with them. The gospel, in their case, must be shown to accord with the wants of man, its teachings reconciled with philosophy, before they will or can receive it. The union of religion and philosophy is the great problem of this age, and their marriage will be the high festival of the world. We must object, also, to the want of candor which marks too many of our theological works. No writer, be his subject the gospel or the koran, should take for granted what he professes to prove. He who starts upon any controversy, with the feeling that he is all right, and his opponents all wrong, may convince himself, but no one else. And this is the spirit of a great majority of the 'demonstrations of the truth of the gospel.' The objections are termed scoffs, and the objectors scoffers, at the outset; which of course implies that there is no chance of their being right, in any particular. We shall not be misunderstood in saying, that the doubters of the gospel have, in fact, been among its best friends; for they have given us a firmer hold of, and a clearer insight into, its divine truth and beauty. LUTHER, let it not be forgotten, was styled a 'scoffer.' This book, and others like it, will give to those who believe, without knowing why, some reasons for believing; to those who doubt, to doubt on; until some fair writer, who sympathizes with objectors, without assenting to their creeds, shall remove their honest unbelief.

TRAVELS IN THE THREE GREAT EMPIRES OF AUSTRIA, RUSSIA, AND TURKEY. BY C. B. ELLIOTT, M. A., F. R. S., Vicar of Godalmin, etc. In two volumes, 12mo. Philadelphia: LEA AND BLANCHARD.

6

THE Vicar of Godalmin set about writing a real book of travel, and, we may suppose, nothing more. There are more facts in the two volumes before us, than are usually encountered in the same number of pages. The work begins with this sentence, characteristic of the whole performance: The first object on the road to Presburg, that arrests the eye, after quitting the busy haunts of men, in the great capital of Austria, is the burial ground, on the right hand side, so full, so overflowing with sepulchral monuments, that, at a short distance, they present only a confused mass of masonry.' And then we hear an account of the phlegmatic German, who officiated as coachman,' and even a description of his 'blue apron.' Nothing that met the eye of the traveller, seems to be omitted; and we doubt not this was an easy way to make a book. We therefore can recommend the work to all lovers of facts, and can assure them that a want of particularity is not one of its faults; and moreover, the reader will be pretty sure of finding out whether the object described be 'on the right hand side' or on the left. In short, it may be said of our tourist, as was remarked 21

VOL. XIII.

by a caustic critic of a traveller equally minute, and as invincibly dull, that 'he seems to consider the most ordinary occupation in travelling to be that of moving from one place to another; setting off at a certain hour of the morning, and arriving at a particular hour in the evening; and it may be, paying the expense incurred.' Extending somewhat farther his views of human affairs, he finds that provisions are either good, or bad, or indifferent; that the same general observation applies also to beds; and that all these objects may likewise be distinguished by another principle of classification, derived from attending to their prices. From this view of the subject, the transition is easy to roads and ferries, including tolls and bridges, with the accessary matter of horses and carriages, not forgetting a detailed picture of the driver's livery. The same love of generalizing leads him to a contemplation of the works of nature; and he surveys with an accurate and discriminating eye the whole state of the weather, which, like the roads and conveyances, is remarkable for being sometimes better and sometimes worse. Seriously, however, we do not really mean to find fault with Mr. ELLIOTT, for we believe there is a certain class of readers who will delight in his volumes, and better still, may gain, it may be, a good deal of knowledge from them; but whether reading of this description be the best that can be had upon the subject, is, we think, a question.

ROB OF THE BOWL: A LEGEND OF SAINT INIGOE's. By the Author of 'Swallow Earn,' 'Horse Shoe Robinson,' etc. In two volumes, 12mo. pp. 445. Philadelphia: LEA AND BLANCHARD.

WE have perused this work with much satisfaction; and recommend it to the attention of our readers; assured that those who can fully appreciate this style of writing, will concur with us in saying, that these novels are destined to take rank with some of the best native works of fiction of the present day. The volumes do not, in our judgment, detract from the well-earned praise which the former productions of the author have received, although we have seen as much intimated by some of our contemporaries. They are written in a pure style; the plot is well laid, and the incidents naturally worked up; the characters are drawn with care, and ably supported, and with particular reference, it should seem, to their moral tendency; for we find in the work no glossing over of vicious principles, no depravity dressed up in a fascinating garb, which constitutes the greatest objection to books otherwise delightful and useful, for their spirit, taste, and talent. In this respect the writer has set a praiseworthy example to many competitors in his walk of fiction; and we gladly welcome a publication, in which vice no longer commends itself to the imagination of youth, by being arrayed in the false colors of unfortunate virtue.

'Rob of the Bowl' is a strange but not an unnatural character; one who has been spoiled by over indulgence of bad passions, and rendered misanthropic by imaginary wrongs. 'Cocklescraft,' another prominent personage, is a wretch, in every sense of the word; and we are well pleased to find, that no mysterious secret has been wound around him, to claim from amiable pity a sympathy of which the baseness and depravity of his mind is undeserving. And we cannot but think that 'ladies of a certain age,' whom accident or preference has allowed 'to walk in maiden meditation fancy free,' ought to feel particularly obliged to our author for removing the stigma from this hitherto persecuted class, by allowing them to appear in that amiable and charitable light, which we are convinced is their general character. A man is allowed to remain single, and while he outrages his nature by depriving himself of the moral motives and restraints of domestic life; shuts himself out from those