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reputation, and had gained great riches without reproach, resolved to retire for the remainder of his days to his country-seat. In order to take leave of his friends and acquaintance in a handsome manner, he invited the young and the old of both sexes (persons of the first fashion in the place) to an entertainment at his own house. They assembled with great expectations; but, to their no small surprise, saw a long oak table, hardly covered with a scanty blue cloth, on which were alternately placed platters of butter milk, sour-crout, pickled herrings, and cheese. The rest of the cheer was made up with butter and ryebread, and cans of small-beer were at hand for those who chose to drink. Trenchers served instead of plates, and not a single servant attended. The company secretly cursed the old man's humour; but, on account of his great age and still greater merit, they restrained their resentment, and appeared contented with their homely fare. The old gentleman, seeing the joke take, was unwilling to carry it too far; and, at a signal given, two clean country maids, in their rustic garb, cleared the table, and brought in the second course. The blue cloth was changed for white linen, the trenchers for pewter, the rye-bread to houshold brown, the small-beer to strong ale, and the mean food into good salted beef and boiled fish. The guests now grew better pleased, and the master of the feast more pressing in his invitations.

After

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taste, and renew the appetite of the whole company. To this were added generous burgundy sparkling champaign, in short, a choice of the best wines commerce can procure in a trading country; and, that nothing might be wanting that could please the senses, as soon as a sumptuous dessert was bought in, a melodious concert of a variety of instruments of music was heard in the next room. Healths went round, mirth increased, and the old gentleman, seeing that nothing but the departure of him and the gravest of the company was waited for to give a loose to joy and pleasure, rose up, and thus addressd his guests:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for the favour you have done me by honouring me with your company. It is time for one of my age to withdraw; but I hope those who are disposed for dancing will accept of a ball which I have ordered to be prepared for you. Before the fiddles strike up, give me leave to make a short reflection on this entertainment, which otherwise might appear whimsical, and even foolish. It may serve to give you an idea of the source of our wealth and prosperity. By living after the penurious manner exhibited in the first course, our ancestors raised their infant state, and acquired liberty, wealth, and power. These were preserved by our fathers, who lived in that handsome but plain way exemplified in the second course. But if an old man may be permitted, before he leaves you, whom he dearly loves, to speak freely, I am really afraid that the profusion which you have witnessed in the last course will, if we continue it, deprive us of those advantages which our ancestors earned by the sweat of their brows, and which our fathers, by their industry and good management, have transmitted to us. Young people, I advise you to be merry this evening, but to think seriously to-morrow on the lesson i have given you to-day. Good night."

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from Elsineur or the Sound is about 21 English miles. The city was founded in the 12th century, and was originally a place of resort for fishermen only. The harbour is circular, and the entrance into it from the sea is a channel or gut, the middle of which only is navigable, The water on each side is very shallow, and defended by a peculiar kind of military work called naval horns, the nature and strength of which merit a more detailed explanation. They are made of large beams, from 60 to 30 feet long, shod with iron, and put together like chevaux de frize. They are then put on flat-bottomed vessels, and sunk, three, four, and five feet below the surface of the water. In the belts, and other passages, particularly in the narrow channels, where the water has neither tide nor current, they are easily laid down and taken up. The Swedes were the first who made use of these works, and they have subsequently been adopted both at Cronstadt and Copenhagen.

Elsineur was a small village till 1446, when it was made a staple town by Eric of Pomerania, who conferred several immunities upon it. From that period it has gradually increased in size and wealth; and is now the most commercial town in Denmark, except Copenhagen, from which it is distant two miles. It contains about 6000 inhabitants.

The passage of the Sound is guarded by the fortress of Cronberg, which is situated on the edge of a peninsular promontory, the nearest point of land to Sweden distant about three miles. is strongly fortified towards the land by ditches, bastions, and entrenchments, and, towards the sea, by several batteries, mounted with sixty pieces of cannon, the largest fortyone pounders. Every vessel, as it passes, lowers her top-sails and pays a toll at Elsineur. It is generally asserted that this fort guards the Sound, and that all vessels must, on account of the shoalness of the

water and currents, steer so close to the batteries, as to be exposed to their fire. This, however, is a mistaken notion. On account, indeed, of the numerous and opposite currents in the Sound, the safest passage lies near the fort; but the water in any place is of sufficient depth for vessels to keep at a distance, and the largest ships can even sail close to the coast of Sweden. The kings of Sweden claimed an exemption from toll, but by a treaty in 1720, they agreed to be come subject. All vessels, besides a small duty, are rated at 1 per cent. of their cargoes, except the English, French, Danish, and Swed ish, which only pay one per cent. and, in return, the crown takes the charge of light-houses, signals, &c.

The palace of Cronberg, which is in the fort, is a square Gothic building. In it was confined the unfortunate Matilda, sister to the English king. Elsineur is also remarkable for being the scene of Shakspeare's Hamlet, and there is a garden half a mile from Cronberg, which is said by tradition to be the very garden where the mur. der of his father was perpetrated. The garden occupies the side of the hill, and is laid out in terraces ris ing one above the other.

For the Literary Magazine. THE REFLECTOR.

NO. XXI.

HOWEVER high the land of our vity may stand in our estimation, however warm our attachment to it, and the pleasures we have enjoyed in it may be, while we are permitted to reside there, we then are apt to think we fully understand the nature of that principle which attaches us to our country, and the extent and weight of its influence. We sit down calmly, and in a cool philosophical manner weigh the re

spective merits of different countries, and the happiness we enjoy, or the misery we suffer in our own, and adjudge the superiority to the one or the other, as a sense of justice seems to direct us; but when we have experienced the vicissitudes of life, and find ourselves cast upon a foreign shore, it is then, and then only, that we feel the full force of that noble sentiment, principle, call it what you will, which we feel towards the country which gave us birth; it is then we recal with regret the recollection of those almost undefinable pleasures we have there enjoyed, the little sports of our child, hood, the mansion, whether great or small, which was once our dwelling, the trees which shaded it, the school in which we were taught our earliest lessons, and a hundred other subjects of remembrance, at which the calm and frigid philosopher would laugh, and esteem as nothing, but which the man of feeling regards with peculiar satisfaction. We con trast them with the cares, the inconveniences, and anxieties which are our portion at the present moment; these then assume a more melancholy hue; or, if a portion of happiness be allotted to us in a foreign country, that we have once experienced in our own is supposed to outweigh it as a mountain would the dust of the balance,

But when we are banished from our native country by despotic power, or carried into captivity by a nation more powerful than our own, the remembrance of it excites sensations still more pleasing, as they relate to the one we have left, and more painful with respect to that in which we are doomed to inhabit. Lewis, in his "Exile," describes the emotions of a person thus situated. He places the hero of the poem on board the vessel which is about to convey him from Spain, viewing his native shores for the last time, and lamenting that his "banished eyes" should no more behold them, as being delighted with hearing,

"From yonder craggy point, the gale

of even

Wafting his native accents to his ear." He describes the fisher's bliss, and laments his own calamity; gives an account of the country to which he is bound, one "where snakes and tygers breed," &c.; and then proceeds in the following animated and pathetic manner. He says, not all the distresses I am likely to suffer affect me so much

"As thus to sever, With many a bitter sigh, dear land, from thee;

To think that I must doat on thee for ever;

To feel that all thy joys are torn from me."

And again he laments his unfortu. nate destiny in the following words;

"Ah, me! how oft shall Fancy's

dreams in slumber Recal my native country to my mind! How oft regret shall bid me sadly

number

Each lost delight and dear friend left behind."

The reader will pardon me, I trust, for quoting so considerable a part of this affecting poem, on account of its beauty. But to proceed: The relator of captain Cook's voyages says, that, while dining at a town in Kamtschatka, it is impossible to describe the emotion which was produced on their minds by seeing the stamp of London on one of the spoons they were using. They were in a distant and inhospitable clime, far from every thing on which they had placed their affections. Under such circumstances, seeing, when least expected, the name of that city which had given many of them birth, and which recalled to all the most delightful scenes of for mer pleasures, it is not surprising that this circumstance should excite the most tender and interesting emotions.

But nowhere is this sentiment described with more force and beauty than in the 137th psalm:

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BESIDES those ruins in the Illinois and Wabash countries, which have often been mentioned, there hundred miles further west, particuare others no less remarkable, many larly in the country about the great falls of the Missisippi. As we approach these falls, commonly called St. Anthony's, we frequently meet with pyramids of earth from thirty to seventy and even eighty feet in height. These are, most probably, the tombs of the ancient kings and chieftains of this part of America, though there are others which I am inclined to believe were erected in consequence of some signal victory, and possibly to cover the bones. and carcasses of the slain. In digging horizontally into several of these pyramids a little above the base, we generally found a stratum of white substance, somewhat like moist lime, and glutinous withal, extending in all probability several yards within, or perhaps nearly the whole length of the diametrical line. I had every reason to believe this consolidated chalky substance to be the remains of skeletons buried perhaps two hundred centuries ago, and converted by time and the operations of the elements into their present state. Many tokens re

main on both sides of the Missisippi, of their being in ancient ages as well cultivated and as thickly inhabited as the country on the Danube or the Rhine; which fully proves that the literati have been too hasty in denominating America a new world, or an original present to the European from the hands of rude nature.

A copper mine was opened some years since further down the Missisippi, and, to the great surprise of the labourers, a large collection of mining tools were found several fathoms below the superficies of the earth. Another person, in diggging for a well, discovered a furnace of brick-work, five fathoms below the present surface; and in this furnace were found a quantity of coals and firebrands, which, for aught we know, might have been kindled in the days of Moses or Lycurgus.

Not long since, at a spot on the Ohio where the bank had been wasted by the undermining of the water, a stone dropped out, of the hardest kind of black marble, about seven pounds in weight, having twelve equal surfaces, each surface being mathematically equilateral and equiangular five-sided figures: this does not appear to be a lusus natura; but a work of exquisite art, the offspring of human ingenuity. Near the falls of the Missisippi, there is a spring in the bed of the river, which has been enclosed with stone work of unknown antiquity, to keep out the fresh water. In times of freshes, however, the river overflows the stone work, and mix es with the brine, so that it does not afford salt to the savages hereabouts until the river is considerably fallen,

In several places, circular fortifications have been discovered in the same country; these are constantly inclosed with deep ditches,and fenced with a breast work. From these, and many other similar remains of antiquity, one would be inclined to think that America has been inhabited longer than has been commonly imagined. Several tribes, on the

western side of the great river above mentioned, dated their existence for more than twenty thousand moons back, and the Indians of the western world go infinitely farther into the depths of time, though both relate many events of these distant periods that are evidently mixed with fable.

For the Literary Magazine.

THE MELANGE.

NO. X.

Irish Literature.

IT has often surprized me, says Arthur Browne, in his Sketches, that a nation like the Irish, remarkable for its valour, and whose inhabitants, even down to the peasantry, are blessed with a peculiar acuteness of mind, and a characteristic turn of wit and pleasantry, should not have filled a greater space in the eye of mankind. The reason I believe is, that their wit and talent for ridicule are employed in depreciating one another, and their valour too often exhausts itself in idleness and riot.

In Scotland, if any man becomes an author, the whole nation joins in praising and elevating him; but in Ireland, to be a writer is almost sufficient to ensure mockery; whoever takes up his pen, especially if it be in the province of belles lettres, whole tribes of satirists, like the monkies of Africa, begin to chatter and grin at him, and employ every art to laugh him down: the consequence is, few write: the modest, who have talents, confine their display to conversation and to professional exertions, while the satirists take care to do nothing but find fault, and never venture to expose themselves to criticisms, by writing any thing.

The Irish are so accustomed to be governed by England in every thing, taste as well as politics, that

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