empire. But to hear himself charged with having formerly held very different principles from those he then maintained; and to hear it alleged that the principles he then reprobated had been formerly learned from himself, was more than his ardent temper, wrought up to an extraordinary state of impressibility on the particular topic, and rendered, perhaps, somewhat more irritable by age and disappointment, could listen to with decorous patience. Some disparaging observations made by Mr. Fox on the "Reflec tions," it is said, had been conveyed to him. Putting all these things together, we are to consider how far they go in excuse of that renunciation of Mr. Fox as his friend, in which he persevered to the conclusion of his life. To say that he never forgave Mr. Fox, is an assertion unsupported by proof. He died, declaring a catholic forgiveness of all injuries and offences. And though we do not forget the boundless extent of the christian precept of forgiveness, yet we cannot consider that even christianity requires that we sho'd live in harmony and society with those whose maxims and principles appear to us to militate against the repose of mankind.

That these separations, coöperating with the effect which had been produced by his excessive and unseemly violence in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings, greatly diminished his popularity and influence, is not to be denied. In the latter years of his life he found it difficult to detain the attention of the house. The pride of past service, and, perhaps, in some degree, the irritability of age, laid him open to the attacks of young men, who had known him only in those scenes in which the failure of temper had been mistaken for the decay of faculty. Urged to fury by the stings of flies, his high-mindedness sometimes forsook him, and he gave to his puny assailants an ungenerous triumph. He could not, as one of those great cattle, (to use his own simile,) repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, and chew the cud and be silent, despising the little, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Retreating from a scene of exertion, in which his value was so ill appreciated, he set about proving to the world that old age had not impaired his faculty. How far he succeeded may be judged from the perusal of his different pamphlets on the French revolution. As Philopatris Varvicensis has seemed to consider himself deficient in justice to Mr. Fox, without adding to the catalogue of his excellencies the gift of prophecy, which, by a sort of qualifying phrase, he calls "the faculty of presage ;" we challenge for Mr. Burke at least an equal share of this power of penetrating futurity. History, which is the register of the mortality of govern ments, had surely not withheld from Mr. Burke what she had communicated to Mr. Fox. And the peculiar cases which, in every

constitution of government, have a tendency to dissolution beyond the power of any stated remedy, were, we will venture to affirm, at least as well understood by Mr. Burke as by Mr. Fox. To be plain, in the part which Mr. Fox has acted in politics, or in his speeches in the senate, we can perceive none of this prophetic spirit. He was, by profession and practice, a determined party man, furiously bent on destroying the credit of those who kept the government in their hands, to the exclusion of him and his friends. And if he possessed the gift of prophecy, his talent at least was no mystery, since every man in the country might easily anticipate what Mr. Fox would predict as the result of every measure proposed by the government of which he made no part. And this Philopatris Varvicensis must know, canting apart, to be the amount of Mr. Fox's supernatural gift of presage concerning the affairs of the country.

After saying thus much on the prophetic spirit attributed to Mr. Fox, we will not represent Mr. Burke as a soothsayer; but we will venture to affirm, that on the article of the revolution in France, and its probable issue, the predictions of Mr. Burke have been confirmed in a manner that bears extraordinary testimony to the strength and wisdom of his calculations. Mr. Fox, at the date of that event, which he hailed as so auspicious in its promises, was a young man in comparison of Mr. Burke; but the young man was dreaming dreams, while the old man was seeing visions. To the last hour of his life, these visions were expanding the mind of Mr. Burke, and his pen was employed in promulgating them. And when he was no longer able to dictate to the senate, we may class him at least with the Fabricii, the Curii, and the Coruncanii, et cæteri senes qui rempublicam consilio et auctoritate defendebant.

Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. By Major Amos Stoddard, Member of U. S. M. P. S. and of the NewYork Historical Society. 8vo. pp. 488. Philadelphia, published by Mathew Carey. 1812.

[From the Eclectic Review, for August, 1813.]

IF other indications of the national character would warrant us, we should be willing to impute it to a republican dislike of ostentation, that the Americans have hitherto made so little literary use of their originally immense territory, and of the vast addition to it in the recent acquisition of Louisiana. How different is the case among us, the people of monarchies. We see so much importance in a little of the earth of our dominions, and in the sub

stances that roughen its surface, that we should deem it a meanspirited surrender of the honour due to our mundane rank, to leave any considerable district in the humble condition of merely being shone upon by the sun, pastured by the cattle, tilled and reaped by the men, speckled here and there with houses, and, perhaps, loaded in some part with a ponderous town. The district is not to be contented with so vulgar a share of the world's fortunes. It cannot be satisfied it has any respectable existence, till it is raised into renown by a costly topographical quarto, or even, if it is a particularly ambitious lot of acres, by the whole graphical and typographical honours of an imperial folio. These tributes of respect to our soil, and to what it carries, are multiplying so prodigiously, that if any account is to be kept of their number, and any reckoning of their cost, nothing could be more lucky and oppor tune than that the Americans, not wanting him for any such purpose themselves, have sent us Zerah Colburn, the youthful pro digy of computing faculties. And if it were possible we could a little extend the homestead of our territory-if we could get se cure possession of a small segment of one of the northern departments of France, or a few parishes in the quarter of Walcheren, or a reasonable piece of Zealand, what a multiform and crowding accession a few months would bring to the vast accumulation of descriptions, surveys, sketches, and local histories, which have illustrated our present allotment of Europe.

All this while, those Americans are leaving hundreds of thousands of their square miles without an adventure of research, a measurement, a map, a Flora, or a set of views; leaving them, with barely or hardly the distinction of a name, to display the va rious aspects of climates, and the changing aspects of seasons, for the unparticipated and unenvied entertainment of elks and buffaloes, bears, rattle-snakes, bull-frogs, and the constantly diminishing remainder of a genus of animals still wilder. If they are occa sionally moved, by some commercial prospect, to send a deputation of eyes across a few parallels of the hemisphere, it is marvellous to find how little shall at last be brought back besides the implements of sight themselves-at least, how little shall be reported for the benefit and amusement of the inquisitive multitudes of us that cannot afford to carry our own eyes so far. The meager publication of Patrick Gass is nearly all that we have yet gained of the story and results of the late expedition from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and back again. But perhaps all in good time. Every thing that we do here, they, in due season, will do there. There exists, in unmarked spots, in the neighbour hood of the Atlantic, in that of the Ohio, of the Missouri, of the Columbia, clay that is destined to be one day dignified into bricks, and raised into structures, where royal quarto and folio shall be manufactured, and Paternoster-tows whence they will issue out in

the combined splendour of wisdom, wit, sentiment and the fine arts. Indefatigable Time has been "progressing" ever since the patriarchs of the plains of the Ohio used to stock their farms with Mammoths, and those on the east side of the Alleghany mountains enjoyed, at the foot of those mountains, their inexhaustible beds of oysters, of which the animal portion was as large as a man's foot. The age has come that sees ample regions for republies or kingdoms between that line to which the Atlantic ocean then extended, and the line which bounds it now; and the age will be sure to come of picturesque journeys, and sentimental tours, with the humbler benefits of statistics and topographies.

This class of works, however, must be preceded by one of less pretension, though considerably advanced towards a character of refinement, and a literary execution, beyond the coarse ignorance of the journal of the mere Indian trader or hunter of buffaloes. The works of this previous class must come from men who unite all the hardihood and practical rough seasoning of men of the woods, with a tolerable share of cultivation, and a natural tendency to inquisitiveness and reflection. Some such men will be found to undertake toilsome, protracted, and hazardous journeys of research-will ascertain positions, distances, practicable routes, and the course of rivers-will describe clearly, though not in the style of either artists or poets, the aspects of the country, and the more obvious circumstances in the character of its productions, and of its brute or human inhabitants-and will make some observations, some comparisons, some conjectures, a little deeper than the absolute surface of the objects they contemplate, some slight openings into speculations, which more philosophical minds will long afterwards prosecute, with the aid of later, accumulated, and more accurate observations. The Travels of the late Major Pike* to the head of the Mississippi, and across Louisiana, may be regarded as a hopeful beginning of this class of works, and we wish that other such adventurers may be in preparation, and that the American government may deem this much more ambitious employment for them, than the vulgar occupations of war.

The work before us is not a book of travels, though the author professes to have had personal observation of much of what it describes. It is an irregular mixture of natural and civil history with political geography. The copy now in our possession is, we have some reason to believe, almost the only one which has yet reached this country; on which account, we shall make no apology for presenting our readers with a much more copious examination

We say the "late" because we have little doubt that this spirited, intelligent, and indefatigable explorer is the General Pike whom, in the capacity of second in com mand to General Dearborn, in Canada, the recent accounts mention to have fallen in battle.

of its contents, than we should have judged expedient had the work been an ordinary commodity of the market.

"It fell to my lot," says the major, "in the month of March, 1804, to take possession of Upper Louisiana, under the treaty of cession. The high civil trust confided to me in that country, drew my attention in the first instance to the jurisprudence, in the second to the principles of the French and Spanish colonial governments, and in the third to the civil history and geography of those regions. The records and other public documents were open to my inspection; and, as it was my fortune to be stationed about five years on various parts of the lower Mississippi, and nearly six months on Red River, my inquiries gradually extended to Louisiana in general. The country, even at this day, is less known than any other (inhabited by a civilized people) of the same extent on the globe.

"The United States suddenly and unexpectedly acquired a territory of which they knew not the extent; they were equally unacquainted with its climates, soils, and productions, the magnitude and importance of its numerous rivers, and its commercial and other natural advantages. I therefore indulge the expectation, that the subsequent sketches, however inaccurate or erroneous, will not prove wholly unacceptable to the public; particularly as no one before me, to my knowledge, has attempted a history and description of this territory."

He notices the well known policy of the Spaniards, while they possessed the country, in excluding strangers, and " prohibiting all surveys and discoveries, except for the use of the cabinet." He says the accounts published by missionaries, and even by French officers, "are mostly uninteresting," and those of " Indian traders, and other transient persons, extremely crude, confused, and contradictory." He made, however, the best use of them he could. He has also had access to some ancient manuscript journals; has been furnished by respectable men, in most of the districts, with local and other information; his own excursions in the country have been extensive; and he has examined most of the published works, whether of more or less authority, concerning the country and its history. He confesses, however, that all the yet existing materials are very far from sufficient for the construction of any thing even distantly approaching to a satisfactory work; apologizes for the additional imperfections which he is likely to fall into, from the military habits of his life; and at the same time modestly and very reasonably thinks he has produced a much better account of this large section of the American continent than has yet appeared.-We could not advance far in the perusal, without receiving an impression of good sense, sobriety, industrious inquiry, and a prevailing wish to exhibit the plain truth on every subject.

The first chapter, constituting nearly a fourth part of the