and constitutes the most important portion of the po pulation; especially when the Americans are the subject; inasmuch as they have, in fact, but one class so many respectable families to ruin, by their polluting contact, that the delusion is broke, and they begin to be seen in their essential hideousness. Persons of condition from abroad have so often proved to be ostlers and footmen, and men of learning mountebank doctors, that the Americans find it necessary to shake these foreign vermin from their skirts, and to assert a dignity and self respect, which are the first steps to that consideration from others, hitherto by this excrescent usurpation repelled from their society. Hic nigra succus loliginis, hæc est Erugo mera. a At the inn, where I lodged on my first arrival, it was my fortune to be assorted at every meal with, half a dozen agents from the manufacturing towns of England, some Frenchmen, exiled from St. Domingo, a Dutch supercargo, a Chinese mandarin, as a caitiff from Canton entitled himself, the young Greek, a copy of one of whose letters I sent you some time ago, and countryman of mine; all of whom, after a plentiful regale, and drinking each other's healths till their brains were addled with strong liquors, would almost every day chime into a general execration of the fare, climate, customs, people, and institutions of this nether region. One of the Englishmen, a native of Cornwall, who never was out of a mist in his life till he left the parish of his birth, complained of the variableness of the weather; another of the badness of the beef; and a third of the porter, alleviations, without which they pronounced existence insupportable; taking care to accompany their complaints with magnificent eulogiums on the clear sky, cheap living, and other equally unquestionable advantages of their own country, with occasional intimations thrown in of their personal importance at home. The Cre of society. But in any nation a few individuals, of either the higher or lowest class, are not to be adopted as national types, nor the impressions they com ole French, in a bastard dialect, declaimed at the dishonesty and fickleness of the Americans, the demureness of their manners, and provoking irregularity of the language; winding up their phillippic with a rapturous recollection of the charms of Paris; where, in all probability, no one of them ever was, except to obtain passports for leaving the kingdom. They talk of beauties that they never saw, And fancy raptures that they never knew. The Chinese, who never was free from a sweat till he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and who, when in Canton, never forgot in his prayers to implore the blessings of a famine or `pestilence, catching the contagion of the company, and mechanically imitative, though he could not speak so as to be understood, endeavoured by signs and shrugs to show that he suffered from the heat, and gave us to understand that an annual plague must be inevitable in such a climate. The Irishman, who swallowed two bottles of claret with a meal, besides brandy and malt liquors, swore the intemperate weather gave him fevers. The Hollander smoked his phlegmatic pipe in silence, looking approbation; and the complying Greek nodded assent, while at table, to every syllable that was uttered; though he afterwards coincided with me in a contradiction of the whole. When I was formerly in America, I knew several foreigners, then well stricken in years, who had resided here since the peace of 1783, always grumbling over the privations of this country, and sighing for the moment that should once more present them to the enjoyments of their own; most of whom I have seen since my present visit, living exactly where and as they were, grumbling and sighing as usual; but fat and satisfied, and indulging not the least expectation of ever exchanging their forlorn state here for their brilliant prospects elsewhere. Like a well-fed cu municate, received as the national character. Our opinions of the French or English would be greatly erroneous, if our inquiries were circumscribed to Pa ris or London. rate, they dwell for ever on the fascinations of futurity, as contrasted with the wretchedness of mortality, recommending all good men to hasten from the one to the other, but without any wish for themselves to leave this world of tribu lation. But the arrant misrepresentations of this country, which philosophers and historians, travellers and talebearers seem to have conspired to impress on the ignorance and prejudices of others, would not have had the permanent and extensive effect they have had, both here and in Europe, had they not been adopted, patronised and disseminated by those native Americans, of whom, the number, though daily diminishing, is still too great; who, awed by perpetual comparisons with the superior refinement, power, intelligence, and happiness of Europe, have been rebuked into concessions of their own inferiority. That involuntary feeling of respect, with which the American colonists were accustomed to regard Europe, particularly their mother country, it will require a generation or two to wear out. By European individuals it is asserted on all occasions; by many American individuals it is almost as often, sometimes unconsciously, acknowledged, on one side enforced, on the other conceded, to such a degree, as to mark, not indeed the character of the country, for the country in general neither feels nor avows it, but the characters of many respectable and influential individuals, with a tameness and subserviency they themselves are not aware of; which pervade every department, particularly those of social life and the higher classes; and carry abroad among the many who adopt these individuals as types of the nation, those opinions which are so prevalent of its want of an original national genius and character. It is this colonial spirit which causes in cessant struggles between an instinctive love of country and an habitual veneration for what is European: in which A republican federation, a free press, general education, abundant subsistence, high price of labour, a warm climate, habits of intemperance, a variety of struggle the latter feeling too often predominates; and with many native Americans of education and affluence, who are by no means. deficient in personal independence, the first emotion toward what is American is contempt, the first emotion toward whatever proceeds from that nation of Europe, to which they happen to be most attached, is reverence and admiration. If a custom, production, or institution be American, it costs them an effort to approve; but if foreign, they submit to it with implicit faith. They depreciate not only the politics, literature, science and language, but the morals, manners, and state of society, according to the reduced scale of foreign detraction. But this is not the spirit of the people, but of those small sections, who claim to be their betters. A servile postponement of their own natural and manly habits to the most preposterous European usages, a thirst after the company and alliance of foreigners in preference to their own countrymen, an affected reluctance to live and die where they were born, are some of the symptoms of this miserable disease, infinitely more miserable and less pardonable than its opposite la maladie du pays. A state of society in the meridian of refinement and virtue, midway between simplicity and corruption; gay and polite, without being profligate; shedding the selectest influence of domestic comfort and public tranquillity; to the eye of depravity may present but a homely and insipid scene; but to such as love manly employment and rational recreation, is an enviable state, whose unequalled blessings they do not deserve to partake, who are not grateful for being born in the country where they flourish. Sentiments of repugnance in the natives of such a country are only tolerable, while they remain passive and latent. Whenever they break out into declared opposition, they become obnoxious to detestation and punishment. Such as cannot subdue them, are to be pitied; such as encourage them, ab religious creeds, and the universal sensation of improvement and increase, naturally concur to the constitution of a well informed, ardent, enthusiastic, enterprising and licentious people. Where every man is a citizen, every citizen a freeholder, able and allowed to think, speak, and act for himself, the empire of opinion must be omnipotent: and it is impossible that a free and thinking people can be without a cha horred. They are guilty of the most fatal species of treason-. not that which boldly devotes a country to stratagem, blood and destruction-but that more insidious and more certain hostility, which flows in unseen perennial channels, traducing, betraying and assassinating. Of such as these there can be, I trust, but few in this happy country.-Wretches, who have no God, household, or supreme-the creeping things of the earth, who feed on the offals of foreigners-who lick the foot that tramples on them-who are despised by all others, even those they worship, and must despise themselves." Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, From wandering on a foreign strand! To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, T |