of a baby; the mothers as busy with affectations of another kind, and the brother siding hither and thither, now with assiduity and now with nonchalance; and no one imparting the refreshment of a natural countenance, movement, or tone, I almost doubted whether I was awake. The village scenes that I had witnessed rose up in strong contrast,―the mirthful wedding, the wagon-drives, the offerings of wild-flowers to the stranger, the unintermitting, simple courtesy of each to all; and it was scarcely credible that these contrasting scenes could both be existing in the same republic.”

MANNERS OF GENTLEMEN AND LADIES IN PUBLIC.

"So much more has naturally been observed by travellers of American manners, in stages and steam-boats, than in private houses, that all has been said, over and over again that the subject deserves. I need only testify that I do not think the Americans eat faster than other people on the whole. The celerity at hoteltables is remarkable; but so it is in stage-coach travellers in England, who are allowed ten minutes or a quarter of an hour for dining. In private houses I was never aware of being hurried. The cheerful, unintermitting civility of all gentlemen travellers throughout the country, is very striking to a stranger. The degree of consideration shown to women is, in my opinion, greater than is rational, or good for either party; but the manners of the American stage-coach might afford a valuable lesson and example to many classes of Europeans who have a high opinion of their own civilization. I do not think it rational or fair that every gentleman, whether old or young, sick or well, weary or untired, should, as a matter of course, yield up the best places in the stage to a lady passenger. I do not think it rational or fair, that five gentlemen should ride on the top of the coach, (where there is no accommodation for holding on, and no resting-place for their feet,) for some hours of a July day in Virginia, that a young lady, who was slightly delicate, might have room to lay up her feet, and change her posture as she pleased. It is obvious that, if she was not strong enough to travel on common terms in the stage, her family should have travelled in an extra, or staid behind, or done any thing rather than allowed five persons to risk their health and sacrifice their comfort for the sake of one. Whatever may be the good moral effects of such self-renunciation on the tempers of the gentlemen, the custom is very injurious to ladies. Their travelling manners are any thing but amiable. While on a journey, women who appear well enough in their homes, present ak the characteristics of spoiled children. Screaming and trembling at the apprehension of danger are not uncommon; but there is something far worse in the cool selfishness with which they accept the best of every thing, at any sacrifice to others, and usually, in the South and West, without a word or look of acknowledgment. They are as like spoiled children when the gentlemen are not present to be sacrificed to them,-in the inn parlor, while waiting for meals or the stage, and in the cabin of a steamboat. I never saw any manner so repulsive as that of many American ladies on board steamboats. They look as if they supposed you mean to injure them, till you show to the contrary. The suspicious sideglance, or the full stare, the cold, immovable observation, the bristling self-defence the moment you come near, the cool pushing to get the best place, every thing said and done without the least trace of trust or cheerfulness, these are the disagreeable consequences of the ladies being petted and humored as they are. The New England ladies, who are compelled by their superior numbers to depend less upon the care of others, are far happier and pleasanter companions in a journey than those of the rest of the country."

FOREST SCENERY.

"The valley of the Connecticut is the most fertile valley in New England; and it is scarcely possible that any should be more beautiful. The river, full, broad, and tranquil as the summer sky, winds through meadows, green with pasture or golden with corn. Clumps of forest trees afford retreat for the cattle in the summer heats; and the magnificent New England elm, the most graceful of trees, is dropped singly, here and there, and casts its broad shade upon the meadow. Hills of various height and declivity bound the now widening, now contracting valley. To these hills the forest has retired; the everlasting forest, from which, in America, we cannot fly. I cannot remember that, except in some parts of the prairies, I was ever out of sight of the forest in the United States: and I am sure I never wished to be so. It was like the verdurous wall of Paradise,' confining

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the mighty southern and western rivers to their channels. We were, as it ap peared, imprisoned in it for many days together, as we traversed the south-eastern States. We threaded it in Michigan; we skirted it in New-York and Pennsylvania; and throughout New England it bounded every landscape. It looked down upon us from the hill-tops; it advanced into notice from every gap and notch in the chain. To the native it must appear as indispensable in the picturegallery of nature as the sky. To the English traveller it is a special boon, an added charm, a newly-created grace, like the infant planet that wanders across the telescope of the astronomer. The English traveller finds himself never weary by day of prying into the forest, from beneath its canopy; or, from a distance drinking in its exquisite hues: and his dreams, for months or years, will be of the mossy roots, the black pine, and silvery birch stems, the translucent green shades of the beech, and the slender creeper, climbing like a ladder into the topmost boughs of the dark holly, a hundred feet high. He will dream of the march of the hours through the forest; the deep blackness of night, broken by the dun forest-fires, and startled by the showers of sparks, sent abroad by the casual breeze from the burning stems. He will hear again the shrill piping of the whip-poor-will, and the multitudinous din from the occasional swamp. He will dream of the deep silence which precedes the dawn; of the gradual apparition of the haunting trees, coming faintly out of the darkness; of the first level rays, instantaneously piercing the woods to their very heart, and lighting them up into boundless ruddy colonnades, garlanded with wavy verdure, and carpeted with glittering wild-flowers. Or, he will dream of the clouds of gay butterflies, and gauzy dragon-flies, that hover above the noon-day paths of the forest, or cluster about some graceful shrub, making it appear to bear at once all the flowers of Eden. Or the golden moon will look down through his dream, making for him islands of light in an ocean of darkness. He may not see the stars but by glimpses; but the winged stars of those regions,-the gleaming fire-flies,-radiate from every sleeping bough, and keep his eye in fancy busy in following their glancing, while his spirit sleeps in the deep charms of the summer night. Next to the solemn and various beauty of the sea and the sky, comes that of the wilderness. I doubt whether the sublimity of the vastest mountain-range can exceed that of the allpervading forest, when the imagination becomes able to realise the conception of what it is.

"In the valley of the Connecticut, the forest merely presides over the scene, giving gravity to its charm. On East Mountain, above Deerfield in Massachusetts, it is mingled with grey rocks, whose hue mingles exquisitely with its verdure. We looked down from thence on a long reach of the valley, just before sunset, and made ourselves acquainted with the geography of the catastrophe which was to be commemorated in a day or two. Here and there, in the meadows, were sinkings of the soil, shallow basins of verdant pasturage, where there had probably once been small lakes, but where cattle were now grazing. The unfenced fields, secure within landmarks, and open to the annual inundation which preserves their fertility, were rich with unharvested Indian corn; the cobs left lying in their sheaths, because no passer-by is tempted to steal them; every one having enough of his own. The silvery river lay among the meadows; and on its bank, far below us, stretched the avenue of noble trees, touched with the hues of autumn, which shaded the village of Deerfield. Saddleback bounded our view opposite, and the Northampton hills and Green Mountains on the left. Smoke arose, here and there, from the hills' sides, and the nearer eminences were dotted with white dwellings, of the same order with the homesteads which were sprinkled over the valley.'

WORLD-MAKING.

"It is an absorbing thing to watch the process of world-making, both the formation of the natural and the conventional world. I witnessed both in America; and when I look back upon it now, it seems as if I had been in another planet. I saw something of the process of creating the natural globe in the depths of the largest explored cave in the world. In its depths, in this noiseless workshop, was Nature employed with her blind and dumb agents, fashioning mysteries which the earthquake of a thousand years hence may bring to light, to give man a new sense of the shortness of his life. I saw something of the process of worldmaking behind the fall of Niagara, in the thunder cavern, where the rocks that have stood for ever tremble to their fall amidst the roar of the unexhausted floods.

I stood where soon human foot shall stand no more. Foot-hold after foot-hold is destined to be thrown down, till, after more ages than the world has yet known, the last rocky barrier shall be overpowered, and an ocean shall overspread countries which are but just entering upon civilized existence. Niagara itself is but one of the shifting scenes of life, like all of the outward that we hold most permanent. Niagara itself, like the systems of the sky, is one of the hands of Nature's clock, moving, though too slowly to be perceived by the unheeding,-still moving, to mark the lapse of time. Niagara itself is destined to be as the traditionary monsters of the ancient earth-a giant existence, to be spoken of to wondering ears in studious hours, and believed in from the sole evidence of its sur viving grandeur and beauty. While I stood in the wet whirlwind, with the crystal roof above me, the thundering floor beneath, and the foaming whirlpool and rushing flood before me, I saw those quiet, studious hours of the future world when this cataract shall have become a tradition, and the spot on which I stood shall be the centre of a wide sea, a new region of life. This was seeing worldmaking. So it was on the Mississippi, when a sort of scum on the waters betokened the birth-place of new land. All things help in this creation. The cliffs of the upper Missouri detach their soil, and send it thousands of miles down the stream. The river brings it, and deposits it, in continual increase, till a barrier is raised against the rushing waters themselves. The air brings seeds, and drops them where they sprout, and strike downwards, so that their roots bind the soft soil, and enable it to bear the weight of new accretions. The infant forest, floating, as it appeared, on the surface of turbid and rapid waters, may reveal no beauty to the painter; but to the eye of one who loves to watch the process of world-making, it is full of delight. These islands are seen in every stage of growth. The cotton-wood trees, from being like cresses in a pool, rise breasthigh; then they are like the thickets, to whose shade the alligator may retreat; then, like groves that bid the sun good-night, while he is still lighting up the forest then like the forest itself, with the wood-cutter's house within its screen, flowers springing about its stems, and the wild-vine climbing to meet the night breezes on its lofty canopy. This was seeing world-making. Here was strong instigation to the exercise of analysis.

"One of the most frequent thoughts of a speculator in these wildernesses, is the rarity of the chance which brings him here to speculate. The primitive glories of nature have, almost always since the world began, been dispensed to savages; to men who, dearly as they love the wilderness, have no power of bringing into contrast with it the mind of man, as enriched and stimulated by cultivated society. Busy colonists, pressed by bodily wants, are the next class brought over the threshold of this temple: and they come for other purposes than to meditate. The next are those who would make haste to be rich; selfish adventurers, who drive out the red man, and drive in the black man, and, amidst the forests and the floods, think only of cotton and of gold. Not to such alone should the primitive glories of nature be dispensed; glories which can never be restored. The philosopher should come, before they are effaced, and find combinations and proportions of life and truth which are not to be found elsewhere. The painter should come, and find combinations and proportions of visible beauty which are not to be found elsewhere. The architect should come, and find suggestions and irradiations of his art which are not to be found elsewhere. The poet should come, and witness a supremacy of nature snch as he images in the old days when the world's sires came forth at the tidings of the rainbow in the cloud. The chance which opens to the meditative the almost untouched regions of nature, is a rare one; and they should not be left to the vanishing savage, the busy and the sordid."

AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS.

"Side by side with the sinners of the rostrum, stand the sinners of the newspaper press. The case is clear, and needs little remark or illustration. The profligacy of newspapers, wherever they exist, is a universal complaint; and, of all newspaper presses, I never heard any one deny that the American is the worst. Of course, this depravity being so general throughout the country, it must be occasioned by some overpowering force of circumstances. The causes are various; and it is a testimony to the strength and purity of the democratie sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.

While the population is so scattered as it now is, throughout the greater part

of the Union, nothing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep from them altogether the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them may easily be practised the discovery that lies may work their intended effect before the truth can overtake them.

"It is hard to tell which is worst-the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true. It is no secret that some able personage at Washington writes letters on the politics and politicians of the general government, and sends them to the remotest corners of the Union, to appear in their newspapers; after which they are collected in the administration newspaper at Washington as testimonies of public opinion in the respective districts where they appear. The worst of it is, that the few exceptions to this depravity,—the few newspapers conducted by men of truth and superior intelligence, are not yet encouraged in proportion to their merits.

"There will be no great improvement in the literary character of the American newspapers till the literature of the country has improved. Their moral character depends upon the moral taste of the people. This looks like a very severe censure. If it be so, the same censure applies elsewhere, and English morals must be held accountable for the slanders and captiousness displayed in the leading articles of British journals, and for the disgustingly jocose tone of their police reports, where crimes are treated as entertainments and misery as a jest. Whatever may be the exterior causes of the Americans having been hitherto illserved in their newspapers, it is now certain that there are none which may not be overpowered by a sound moral taste. In their country, the demand lies with the many. Whenever the many demand truth and justice in their journals, and reject falsehood and calumny, they will be served according to their desire."

Dissertation on the subject of a Congress of Nations, &c.; by a Friend of Peace. E. Collier, Nassau-street.

THIS dissertation was one of those elicited by the premium offered by the American Peace Society for the best essay on the subject of which it treats. The committee of arbitration were in doubt between several of the papers submitted to them, and the Dissertation before us was finally, with a few others, laid over for further decision. As now presented to the public it forms a very neat volume, containing much curious matter in illustration of its subject; and though we believe both the author and his competitors have expended their ingenuity upon the wind, his book contains many anecdotes and reflections which will repay perusal.

Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians being the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; by M. M. Noah. James Van Norden.

THIS is a very ingenious essay of Mr. Noah, and he has adduced much curious and interesting matter in support of his theory, which we certainly believe to be as sound as any other regarding the population of this country. The essayist, however, is guilty of a piece of carelessness in his phraseology, which so old a literateur ought to have avoided; he generalizes too much when speaking of the customs and traditions of our aborigines, calling them always by the general name of Indians, instead of identifying the particular tribe from which his im mediate illustrations are drawn. The effect of this is not unimportant; as, though the majority of the northern tribes, perhaps, were pure theists, yet there is much

idolatry, many superstitions, and some curious mythology intermingled with the creed of many tribes. The Manitou of the Lake-Indians, for instance, has his Manitoag, or inferior divinities to sustain him; and the Wahcondah of the Prairie tribes has his worship shared with the Mehkatungah, or great star among the Pawnees; while the Oweneyo of the Wyandotts and Delawares, and the Nayadda Gwenneyu of the Five Nations, seems to have been the only representative of the unity of God, the true divinity. The latter term we borrow from the mellifluous Seneca, in that hymn beginning

"Sis-wa-den-no-tus Na-yad-da-Gwen-ney-yu,"

"Sing unto the Great Spirit." The numerous extracts already dispersed through the critical notices of our present number, are all that prevent us from quoting largely from Mr. Noah's most interesting essay.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.-WE conclude our Critical Notices this month with the following reply to the able article upon Professor Tucker's new work in the first number of the NEW-YORK REVIEW. The signature sufficiently indicates its source.

This new periodical, in a long and labored diatribe on the character of Mr. Jefferson, (the first article of the first No.) has, for the purpose of proving him a plagiarist, undertaken to trace a resemblance between the Declaration of Independence and various other public documents, some of which instances forcibly remind us of honest Fluellen's comparison between Macedon and Monmouth. The reviewer, finding his efforts inadequate to his liberal purpose, has endeavored to eke out his scanty stock of evidence by the list of grievances prefixed to the first constitution of Virginia, which is almost identical with that embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and which, ever since the death of Mr. Wythe, in 1806, has been known in Virginia to have proceeded from Mr. Jefferson's pen. The critic, however, without venturing to deny the fact, thinks proper to call it in question, upon no better ground than that as Mr. Wythe was in Philadelphia in 1776, attending to his duty in congress, he could not have been in Virginia in the same month, and offered Mr. Jefferson's paper, as is alleged in Tucker's Life of Jefferson, to the convention which formed the constitution of that state. He therefore asks for further explanation.

That explanation shall now be given, and had the reviewer shown half the diligence and zeal in discovering truth that he has exhibited in hunting up materials for detraction, he had been able to furnish it for himself. Thus, in the only history of Virginia for that period, Gerardin's continuation of Burk, he would have found the following passage in the author's notice of the Constitution of Virginia, page 150.

"The preamble, reciting the various acts of misrule by which the government of Virginia, as formerly exercised under the crown of Great Britain, was now totally dissolved, had been transmitted by Thomas Jefferson, from Philadelphia, where that illustrious patriot was then attending the general congress, together with a plan of a new constitution or form of goverment. His valuable communication reached the convention just at the moment when the plan originally drawn up by Colonel George Mason, and afterwards discussed and amended, was to receive the final sanction of that venerable body. It was now too late to retrace previous steps; the session had already been uncommonly laborious; and considerations of personal delicacy hindered those to whom Mr. Jefferson's ideas were imparted from proposing or urging new alterations. Two or three parts of his plan, and the whole of his preamble, however, were adopted; and to this circumstance must be ascribed the strong similitude between that preamble and the Declaration of Independence subsequently issued by the Continental Congress, both having been traced by the same pen."

The author, as his authority for the foregoing facts, refers to a letter from Mr. Wythe to Mr. Jefferson, dated July 27th, 1776. This letter, the original of which is now in the possession of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, is, for greater satisfaction, now published entire. The part in italics may be found in Gerardin, in a foot note to the passage above cited.