by which they were proceeding, and without asking any questions, to strike through the woods, in a direct line, to one of these graves, which lay at the distance of some miles from the road. Now very near a century must have passed over since the part of Virginia, in which this grave was situated, had been inhabited by Indians, and these Indian travellers, who were to visit it by themselves, had unquestionably never been in that part of the country before they must have found their way to it simply from the description of its situation, that had been handed down to them by tradition.-Weld's Travels in North America, vol. ii.

:

NOTES.

ON PART III.

STANZA 16. 1. 4.

The Mammoth comes.

THAT I am justified in making the Indian chief allude to the mammoth as an emblem of terror and destruction, will be seen by the authority quoted below. Speaking of the mammoth, or big buffalo, Mr. Jefferson states, that a tradition is preserved among the Indians of that animal still existing in the northern parts of America.

"A delegation of warriors from the Delaware tribe having visited the governor of Virginia during the revolution, on matters of business, the governor asked them some questions relative to their country,

and, among others, what they knew or had heard of the animal whose bones were found at the Saltlicks, on the Ohio. Their chief speaker immediately put himself into an attitude of oratory, and with a pomp suited to what he conceived the elevation of his subject, informed him, that it was a tradition handed down from their fathers, that in ancient times a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Bick-bone licks, and began an universal destruction of the bear, deer, elk, buffalo, and other animals which had been created for the use of the Indians. That the Great Man above looking down and seeing this, was so enraged, that he seized his lightning, descended on the earth, seated himself on a neighbouring mountain on a rock, of which his seat, and the prints of his feet, are still to be seen, and hurled his bolts among them, till the whole were slaughtered, except the big bull, who, presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they fell, but missing one, at length it wounded him in the side, whereon, springing round, he bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is living at this day."-Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.

STANZA 17. l. 1.

Scorning to wield the hatchet for his bribe,
'Gainst Brandt himself I went to battle forth.

I took the character of Brandt in the poem of Gertrude from the common Histories of England, all of which represented him as a bloody and bad man, (even among savages) and chief agent in the horrible desolation of Wyoming. Some years after this poem appeared, the son of Brandt, a most interesting and intelligent youth, came over to England; and I formed an acquaintance with him, on which I still look back with pleasure. He appealed to my sense of honour and justice, on his own part and on that of his sister, to retract the unfair aspersion which, unconscious of its unfairness, I had cast on his father's memory.

He then referred me to documents which completely satisfied me that the common accounts of Brandt's cruelties at Wyoming, which I had found in books of Travels and in Adolphus's and similar Histories of England, were gross errors, and that in point of fact Brandt was not even present at that scene of desolation.

It it unhappily to Britons and Anglo-Americans that we must refer the chief blame in this horrible business. I published a letter expressing this belief in the New Monthly Magazine, in the year 1822, to which I must refer the reader-if he has any curiosity on the subject-for an antidote to my fanciful description of Brandt. Among other expressions to young Brandt, I made use of the following words :—“ Had I learnt all this of your father when I was writing my poem, he should not have figured in it as the hero of mischief." It was but bare justice to say thus much of a Mohawk Indian, who spoke English eloquently, and was thought capable of having written a history of the Six Nations. I ascertained also that he often strove to mitigate the cruelty of Indian warfare. The name of Brandt therefore remains in my poem a pure and declared character of fiction.

STANZA 17. 1. 8. and 9.

To whom nor relative nor blood remains,

No, not a kindred drop that runs in human veins. Every one who recollects the specimen of Indian eloquence given in the speech of Logan, a Mingo