a curse to mankind - the union of liberty and law. This is the destiny of the Saxon race wherever it is gathered into political societies; this is the sacred trust committed to both nations, the solemn duty resting upon us both, the thought of which causes the variations in our modes of government to sink almost into insignificance. The duty is to be discharged by England and America, in their appropriate forms of action, and the respective spaces of their dominion. The world is wide enough for us both; for England sending forth old British rights to the regions of her colonial empire, wherever the voice of the sea is heard; and America, spreading the same rights, expanded into republicanism, over the vast territories of the western continent. The sublime sense of duty should bring with it a spirit of mutual forbearance and consideration-mutual sympathy. It should chasten the temper of mutual crimination. It ought to teach England not to judge too harshly occasions of popular turbulence, remembering that the annals of at least a hundred years of her history, since the conquest, are red with the bloody records of civil war. England's illustrious living poet, the great philosophic and moral poet of our age, has taught that the love of freedom should not despond, because, from the infirmity of human nature, even genuine freedom may be abused,-that we may expect that "the flood of freedom will often be roused to a mood which spurns the check of salutary bands." This lesson of hope will be observed in some lines suggested by occurrences in our countryan unpublished sonnet of Mr. Wordsworth's, written about two years ago, which we are happy to have it in our power to make public by an appropriate introduction into this article. We need not comment upon it farther than by remarking how characteristic it is of the writer- how illustrative of the love which assuredly dwells in the heart of every truly great poet; first, there is the free utterance of a painful emotion, the solicitude that liberty may be degenerating here into licentiousness, and then the rallying from this depression by virtue of his wonted faithfulness and hopefulness:

COMPOSED ON READING AN ACCOUNT OF MISDOINGS IN PARTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Men of the western world! in fate's dark book,
Whence this opprobrious leaf of dire portent?
Think ye, your British ancestors forsook
Their narrow isle, for outrage provident ?

1842.]

The United States and England.

Think ye, they fled restraints they ill could brook,
To give in their descendants freer vent
And wider range to passions turbulent,

To mutual tyranny a deadlier look?

"Nay," said a voice more soft than zephyr's breath,
"Dive through the stormy surface of the flood
To the great current flowing underneath;
Think on the countless springs of silent good;
So shall the truth be known and understood,
And thy grieved spirit brighten, strong in faith."

417

The sense of duty, of which we have spoken, should teach us, the young nation, standing too upon the vantage-ground, as we regard it, of our republican system, that it is magnanimous, that it is an impulse of filial piety to remember that, from the ancient days of Saxon Alfred, the battles of constitutional freedom have been fought on that little island, and that now the memory of more than a thousand years is the crown of glory covering the brow of Britain. Yes! for more than ten centuries, the tide of popular rights has been flowing onward, and no hand can stay the flood, but the hand of Him who bids the native love of freedom gush from the secret springs in the human heart. But it ill becomes any of us to hope that that flood may be suddenly lashed into the heavings of a tempestuous sea by the infuriate zeal of radicalism, or socialism, or chartism. The man who hopes so has studied the history of civic liberty to little purpose; such is not the help for the cause of human happiness. How could the work of many generations be given up to the rash hands of pride, and ignorance, and licentiousness, without the most fearful havoc! It would have been a grievous thing- grievous even to the descendants of the British race separated by the Atlantic,if in any of the wars of Britain, her continental enemies had desecrated, by their hostile presence, a land venerable to all who use the English language, or live in the security of English law in any region of the earth, a land venerable as the burial-place of Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton; of Bacon and Newton; of Hampden, and Sidney, and Penn; of Chatham and Burke; of Hooker, and Baxter, and Leighton, and Berkley, and the long list of her illustrious divines; and venerable, too, as the land where the ashes of Cranmer, and Ridley, and Latimer, and the noble army of martyrs in her Church, were strown. What American could have heard without sorrow, if the foot of the invader 53

NO. XX.-VOL. X.

had profaned the ancient Abbey, where, for centuries, has been gathered the dust of heroes and poets, in whose fame we have a joint inheritance; if the strange speech of a foreign soldiery had echoed within that cathedral, whose vast dome rises over the metropolis, as if silently proclaiming and preserving the fellowship between earth and sky;-or if the soldier's unsparing hand had assaulted the studious citadels of England's ancient universities! What an emotion would have been awakened in this country, if the enormities perpetrated by the French armies in the Peninsula, had been witnessed in Britain, the land of our fathers, if, for instance, Massena's soldiery, who made havoc of the convents of Alcobaça and Batalha, mutilating and destroying the sacred things, and rifling the tombs in those ancient and venerable burial-places of the kings of Portugal, had burst, infuriated with an ancient and high-wrought national antipathy, into the solemn precincts of Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's! How much more lamentable would it be, if violence were done in the convulsions of popular and domestic violence, if the British Church, planted perhaps by an apostle's hands, well nigh two thousand years ago, and the British constitution, a few centuries younger, were assailed by the reckless frenzy of revolution. The course of constitutional liberty has been slow, and laborious, and gradual, like the course of nature, for it has been controlled by the rule of Providence over the destinies of the human race. But if that course were precipitated, and the institutions of England suddenly driven from their ancient moorings, the powers of evil might rise to a dominion over the powers of good; and, when such imaginings come to our minds, we do not hesitate to echo, from the distant coast of our republic, the words of an eloquent living English divine, exclaiming "What a ghastly crash would it be, sounding to the uttermost shore of the universe, if England, with her thousand crowns of glory, and with the Church of God in her heart, were to fall down into hell!"*

While the nation of England and our own endure, they have, in spite of a hundred differences, political and social, an unity in the solemn guardianship of constitutional freedom. They are ennobled by many of the same ancestral memories, associated by the same language and literature, and the same

"The Victory of Faith, and other Sermons," by JULIUS CHARLES HARE, (Cambridge, 1840,) an author, whom we hope in our next number to make our readers better acquainted with.

1842.]

Catlin's North American Indians.

419

sympathies in the Church, and encouraged by the same hopes of civilization. Remembering how much there is in common, one paramount duty, which belongs to us both, should give us one heart, strong in the same hope and the same faith, expressed in language which we may share, that—

"It is not to be thought of that the flood

Of British freedom which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armory of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold."

ART. VI.-Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians. By GEORGE CATLIN. Written during eight years' travel amongst the wildest tribes of Indians in North America, in 1832, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 and 39. With four hundred illustrations, carefully engraved from his original paintings. New York: 1841. Wiley and Putnam. 2 vols. 8vo.

In order to fulfil the promise made in the last number of our journal, of a fuller notice of the work whose title stands at the head of this article, we have gone through these volumes with some care. The scenes and subjects of which the author treats, and the extensive field for further thought and inquiry which he opens, render them peculiarly interesting to the American reader. It is not long since the Indian Gallery, and the lectures of Mr. Catlin, directed public attention to these subjects, in this and the neighboring cities. These sources of instruction being now transferred to Europe,

* WORDSWORTH's series of " Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty."

are no longer accessible to us; but the present volumes will in a great measure make up for the loss, by diffusing more widely, though less vividly, an acquaintance with the existing representatives of the primitive people of this continent, and thereby serve to excite, it may be hoped, a warmer interest in their concerns, which are so greatly affected for good or for evil by the proximity of a civilized nation of a different race. The narrative and descriptions are drawn from letters and notes written on the very spot of observation, when impressions were yet fresh, and are said by the author to be hastily compiled; a more attentive revisal would have insured a stricter arrangement, and the insertion of dates, which are wanting throughout, and prevented some embarrassment to the reader, who wishes to go with the traveller both in place and time. The first letter of the series which makes up the volumes, is but an introduction, containing some pleasing notices of the author's early life. He was born at Wyoming, a name which rings in the heart and ear like the stricken chord of a harp, and it is an engaging thought that one born in a spot so recently the scene of the unsparing fury of Indian massacre, should, at no distant period, pass some of his happiest hours in the very heart of the Indian country, and, after the observation and study of years, prove the warm friend and advocate of the Indian. Abandoning early the profession of the law, Mr. Catlin repaired to Philadelphia, and devoted himself to the painter's art. The sight of some Indian chiefs on their way to Washington, with their straight limbs and fine forms set off with all the savagery of decoration, was an impulse not to be resisted, and Mr. Catlin's thoughts and steps soon turned towards the native seats of these lords of the river and the prairie.

Letters Nos. 2 to 9, inclusive, all purport to be from the mouth of the Yellow Stone, where the American Fur Company have a strong port and trading station-Nos. 10 to 22, are from the Mandan village, two hundred miles below the Yellow Stone-Nos. 23, 24, 25, from the Minataree and Little Mandan villages, not far from the principal village of the Mandans; and it is not until the reader reaches letter No. 26, at the mouth of the Teton, that he becomes aware that this was the earlier station and scene of Mr. Catlin's labors that the lowness of the stream had protracted the passage of the steamboat to the station at the Yellow Stone, had allowed of a call at the Puncah village, and of Mr.