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Thou, conscious genius! who shall dare profane
The almighty author, when they call thee vain.

Sublime, but baleful gift to creatures frail,
Which earth corrrupts, and meaner things assail!
So proud, so jealous, every shaft can harm,
Tho' winged by withered envy's palsied arm.
In its own haughtiness its wrongs it broods,
Their shadows haunt its deepest solitudes.
So preys the worm unseen on generous oak,
That bore its head against the thunder stroke;
So on the noblest beast the insects feed,
Silent he feels them in his vitals breed,

While not a groan the tortures sharp can force,

Until his murderers banquet on his corse.

(To be Continued.)

OF THE

NEW YORK

SOCIETY LIBRARY

John Bull in America, or the new Munchausen. Charles Wiley. New-York. 1825. pp. 226.

We are informed, on the authority of the Quarterly Review,* that the Federalist was written by a gentleman of Kentucky; who mentions that during the last war, certain choice spirits of the Kentuckians "had seized a party of Indians a few days before, the greater part of whom they not only scalped according to their common practice, but coolly and deliberately amused themselves by cutting razor strops from their bodies while alive!"

Had this beautiful gallimaufry, in which a monstrous and palpable lie is enveloped in more absurdities and anachronisms than we can find parallels for in the original Munchausen, been sported in Blackwood's Magazine, it could have excited no special wonder. On the contrary, it would have been perfectly natural. The writers of that entertaining miscellany are professed followers of Bacon's doctrine, that "a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure;" and their excellent Magazine is conducted entirely on this principle. But that the fastidiously moral and exemplarily pious conductors of the Quarterly Review, the conscientious sticklers for Harry the Eighth's primitive church, who eschew leasing as they do irreverence, should solemnly delude, with so gross a flam, their

☛ *In the review of Miss Wright's Travels. See the Westminster Review, No. IV. page 488. What is a little surprising, no notice is taken of this blundering falsehood by the latter journal.

loyal and religious subscribers, is almost incredible, and can be satisfactorily accounted for in one way only. They must have been hoaxed by some improper Yankee man or boy, who seeing them determined to introduce the story of the razor strops in their book, kindly helped them to an authority of great weight. He should also have referred them to Cotton Mather, who, as we learn from the volume now before us, is alive and in good health, at Boston. ""'Tis true 'tis pity, pity 'tis 'tis true;" but these learned and devout reviewers seem to have an uncommon share of the simplicity and credulity so often associated with unaffected knowledge and piety. They are thus peculiarly liable to be deceived by travellers who visit these remote and unfrequented parts of the earth, where the art of printing has made such slow advances, and about which so little can be positively known. Big and little voyagers, of all ages, sexes, capacities and conditions, clodhoppers, counter-jumpers, stocking-weavers and Newgate birds, may employ to the gentlemen of the Quarterly, with great propriety, the language of Ariosto to his readers except that there is more probability in the fables of the latter, than in the dreams of the former; that he quotes Turpin as his authority, and they the FEDERALIST!

"They who for distant lands their country leave,
Find things unlike what they had deemed before;
And none for truth their stories will receive,
They pass for liars, when their travel's o'er;
Because the vulgar mob alone believe
What they can see and feel, and nothing more→→
Therefore with every inexperienced mind,
We know full little credit we shall find.

"Little or great-we do not care a sou
What the blind, stupid vulgar think or chatter;
Nothing, we know, will seem too gross to you,
Whose better lights will comprehend the matter:
Your praise, the only end we have in view,
Supremely blest if you our labors flatter?”*

*"Chi va lontan dalla sua patria, vede
Cose da quel che già credea lontane,
Che, narrandole poi, non se gli crede,
E stimato bugiardo ne rimane;
Chè'l volgo sciocco non gli vuol dar fede,
Se non le vede, e tocca chiare e piane.
Per questo io so, che l'inesperienza,
Farà al mio canto dar poca credenza,

Poca o molta ch'io n'abbia, non bisogna

Ch'io ponga mente al volgo sciocco, e ignaro :

This amiable weakness of credulity, arising from the native simplicity and candor of their own minds, induced these writers to take Mr. Fearon for an accomplished gentleman, whose prejudices in favour of this unfortunate country, were, disagreeably for himself, but happily for his friends at home, dissipated by his visit to our shores. Whether this worthy was a horse-milliner, or maker of harness, as was once believed, or a stocking-weaver, as has since been stated, he was no doubt disappointed in the country and people which he expected to find. He was never in decent company, unless by accident, and then, of course, but for a short time. He once rose in a public meeting, before a debating society, to deliver his sentiments on the matter under discussion; but having formed extremely erroneous preconceptions of the manner in which freedom was understood, law administered, and the gospel revered among us, he endeavored to ingratiate himself into the favour of his audience by uttering a volly of Jacobinism, blasphemy and slang. He was made to avoid the room, before he had proceeded far in his discourse. Finding, as the result of all his travel, that he could neither make a speech, raise a row, nor get a living without honest industry, he indignantly shook the dust of democracy from his feet, and bent homeward his watery way;' whether in the cabin or steerage non constat. Then with a penitential face, he presented himself to the excellent and unsuspicious junto of the Quarterly, who welcomed him with open arms, and made him their 'guide, philosopher and friend,' and secretary for the American department; and he will be employed, no doubt, as commentator on the next English edition of the Federalist.

6

Credulity grows stronger from the meat it feeds on, and craves more highly spiced aliment, the more it is indulged. The Book of honest Farmer Faux was therefore a bonnebouche for the innocent and philanthropic Reviewers. What a field it opened for the expansion of their sensibilities! How their hearts were poured forth in sympathetic sorrow for the sufferings of so many human beings, and black ones especially, whose parents were brought here formerly in kindness by Englishmen, for the advantages of the climate and the cure of

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their souls; but who are now so sadly neglected by the Americans, and suffered to go without a bit of broadcloth to cover their freezing bodies, in the cold climate of the Carolinas! No hawker's basket full of bloody murders, no poor seamen escaped from the pirates, in the bulletin of his sufferings headed 'horrid barbariety,' ever approached the terrible realities of Farmer Faux's narrative, all which he saw and part of which he was.' The catalogue of miserable sights and sounds which he saw and heard, would make an agreeable additition to Dante's description of hell. Some of the tortures of our poor countrymen in fact exceeded in intensity any that the genius of the poet created; but, as a general picture, the Inferno may be regarded as a prophetic vision of the state of America at the present day. This might be shown fully, if we had Farmer Faux's book at hand, or the review of it; and had also sufficient patience to select their horrors, on horror's head accumulated.' Into this infernal country, without any warning inscription over the portal to turn his daring footsteps, and with no Virgil as his bear-leader through the regions of pestilence, torment and death, which he was about to enter, this honest yeoman unsuspiciously plunged; and after encountering greater perils than Lithgow of yore, or Riley in modern days, but with far greater indemnity, he effected his escape at length, and returned to the bosom of his friends and the embraces of the benevolent Trimestrians. He must have been a very ungrateful man, if unmindful of all his signal deliverances, he did not cause public thanks to be returned for his preservation. For strange as it may appear, he had neither been gouged, bundled with, regulated, gander-pulled, dirked, licked or squatted upon; and moreover had not lost the purity of his vernacular idiom, as appears from the style of his singularly wild and beautiful' travels.

After all, however, it must be confest, that either invention has become weaker in these latter days, or the English travellers in America have been generally poor devils. There is so little variety in their descriptions, and they ring the changes so eternally upon the same chime of dismals and horribles, that we soon get tired of laughing at them. A crack story is dished up in so many different ways, with a change of date and locality, that after one or two repetitions it loses all its charms. It is a pity that Ferdinand Mendez Pinto and Sir John Mandeville are so dead; for could they make a tour in America at this day, they might get certificates and affidavits of their veracity, in the Quarterly; vouchers, which they seem to have

wanted in their own times. But if it is absolutely necessary for the moral and religious improvement of the English people, for the support of the established church, and the stability of the government, that this continent should continue to be the theatre of monstrous and miraculous adventures, as it was reported to be at the earlier periods of its colonization; if it is necessary to hold up our unlucky republic as a nursery of bug-bears, to frighten all naughty loyal babies, overawe radi. cals and dissenters, and to rouse the genius and to mend the hearts of all dutiful subjects, who believe in the Prayer Book and Quarterly Review exclusively, we would humbly suggest that a regular supply might be obtained from this country, at a moderate price, of much more astonishing and terrific materials than any the Reviewers have yet had to work upon. Their travellers have not had the good fortune to pick up one tenth of the information they might have gleaned from Yankees, possessed of facts in relation to Kentucky. Among the alligators, steam-boats and horses, in that savage region, events have occurred which would fill a whole number of the Quarterly; to which the horrors in "the Monk," and "Melmoth," are no touch at all; and after which the cutting razor strops, in the Federalist, from the backs of live Indians, would appear a harmless and justifiable diversion. Upon a proper application, we will put the amiable editors of the Quarterly in a way of obtaining these particulars. Profound secrecy must be observed in the negotiation; as the writer, if known here, would be put to a lingering and miserable death, by being alternately licked" and "bundled."

66

It would seem from the Quarterly, that what we are generally accustomed, here, to call the Western States, and to consider as lying at a trifling distance from us, do, in fact, lie along the Atlantic shore. All the adventurers into these wilds, get among prairies and settlers, before one would think they had had time to get their first dinner on shore. If the worthy Mr. Jedediah Morse ever reads any reviews in the Quarterly, of travels in America, he must shed tears profusely, of sorrow and of anger, on observing the deplorable neglect of his lucubrations by the learned instructors and censors of the British nation. No ordinary deluge or earthquake-nothing but a great general dissolution of the fabric of the world could produce such a confusion of latitudes and longitudes, such dislocations in one place, and such strange juxtaposition of things far remote, in another, as is done by the powerful wand of the

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