after, put that question to sleep; the other remained in angry suspense, till swallowed up, with all less disputes, in the vortex of the Revolution.

"

That event was now nearly impending. It may be remembered, that the duty act of 1767, in which the ministerial scheme of taxing the colonies had been revived, had been subsequently repealed, except as to the article of tea, on which the duty had been retained, by way, it has been remarked, of pepper-corn rent, to denote the tenure of colonial rights." A new stratagem of the ministry in this matter was followed, it is also known, by "the burning of the tea in Boston," and by the retaliatory measure of the Boston-Port Bill; acts, respectively, which may be said to have made up the issue between the conflicting parties. The convention in 1774, assembled at Annapolis, in June of that year. In the October following, the tea-burning at Boston was re-enacted in Maryland, with circumstances of deliberation and defiance that show what a flame was abroad. On the 14th of that month, the brig Peggy Stewart arrived at Annapolis, having, as a part of her cargo, seventeen packages of tea. The non-importation agreement, to which the act of 1767 had given rise, was understood to be retained as to this article, which still bore the badge of usurpation in the obnoxious duty. The consignees did not venture to incur the public indignation by landing the teas, without at least consulting the Non-Importation Committee; but in the meantime, the vessel was entered, and the duties paid by Anthony Stewart, a part owner of the vessel. The people, highly incensed, determined, in a public meeting, at Annapolis, that the tea should not be landed. It was proposed, in a subsequent one, to burn it; and at a county meeting which followed, it was decided, that this should be accompanied also by a most. humiliating apology from Stewart and the consignees. As the people now threatened to burn the vessel itself, the former, by the advice of Carroll of Carrollton, proposed to destroy her with his own hands. Crowds repaired to the water-side to witness the atonement; the vessel was run ashore at Windmill Point, where Stewart set fire to his own vessel, with the tea on board.

All was now preparation for open hostilities. Military associations were formed, military exercises eagerly engaged in, and subscriptions set afoot for purchasing arms and ammunition. The planters were requested to cultivate flax, hemp, and cotton, and to enlarge their flocks with a view to the manufacture of woollens. At this point we must leave Mr. M'Mahon. On the appearance of his second volume, we may resume his narrative from this period, and take the same occasion to notice some other matters in his work, for the discussion of which we have not room at present.

ART. X.-Notes on Italy. By REMBRANDT PEALE. 1 vol 8 vo. Carey & Lea: Philadelphia: 1831.

To review a new volume of travels in Italy, may seem to many readers an unprofitable task. Since its shores were first hailed by the faithful Achates, it has been the goal of travellers and the theme of authors. Every age has sent its children to visit that favoured soil; and the barbarians who rudely invaded it from beyond its Alpine barriers, have been followed by successive generations of men, less rude indeed from the progress of time, but not less ardent to explore and overrun it. Peace and war have alike urged them on. Its mountains, its valleys, its defiles, its broad and sunny plains, have resounded for hundreds of years with the clash of arms, and glittered with innumerable warriors; bands scarcely less numerous have penetrated every corner, led by spirits inquisitive for knowledge or fond of dwelling on beauties of nature, perhaps unrivalled, and on the certain charms of refined and exquisite art, with which no other land, however favoured, has yet dared to offer a comparison. Nor is there wanting the ample, the reiterated record of all this. Historians, and poets, and antiquarians, and novelists, and travellers, have made familiar every incident of every age-every allusion that can give fresh and delightful associations to every spot. What ruin is there that they have not made eloquent? What mountain, what grove, can eager curiosity, urged on by the enthusiasm of taste and genius, discover, which is not already hallowed that has not "murmured forth a solemn sound.”

Yet, still, we read over the oft-repeated tale; we can bear to hear again and again the history of Roman grandeur; we delight to trace the footsteps of warriors, of statesmen, of heroes, philosophers, and poets, whom we have learnt to regard rather as old friends, as household deities, as companions who have enchanted our youth, and beguiled our later years,-who have given us at once rules and lessons of human conduct, and pleasing visions to delight our fancies and our hearts, than as merely individuals in the great family of mankind. We can bear to dwell again and again on the graphic page which imparts to us the knowledge of those triumphant efforts of taste, of genius, and of art, whose charm time cannot injure, and which become to us the more dear, because they remain after centuries have passed away, with scarcely a single rival.

We were impressed with these feelings when we took up the unpretending volume before us; we can scarcely doubt, that they will be common to many at least of our readers, when they find our page headed with "Notes on Italy." To these sentiments will be justly added a favourable impression from the

character of the writer, and the circumstances which have led to his tour and to the publication of the present volume.

As early as the year 1786, Charles Wilson Peale, the father of the author, and a gentleman whose name is well known as connected with the infant arts and sciences of America, was the first person to build an exhibition room in the city of Philadelphia. There he displayed to a public, perhaps but little prepared to appreciate them, the first collection of Italian paintings, and there his son acquired in his earliest youth, not only an enthusiastic admiration for the art itself, which he has since successfully cultivated, but an ardent desire to visit the region where he could behold the productions of artists whose genius he had learned to venerate.

Having commenced his studies as a painter under the direction of his father, he went to England, during the peace of 1802, with the design of visiting France and Italy. The renewal of hostilities, however, prevented this, and after availing himself for a short time of the benefits London offered, he returned home. In 1807, he again crossed the Atlantic; the disturbed situation of the continent obliged him to confine himself to France; but in the gallery of the Louvre he could admire, study, and emulate the noblest productions of the pencil and the chisel, collected by that wonderful man, who loved to blend in the triumphs of warlike ambition, the trophies dear to philanthropy, to science, and to art. Mr. Peale returned to his own country, not satisfied however, because Italy itself was yet unseen. It was in vain that an increasing patronage and attention to the fine arts in his own country offered him renewed reasons to remain there; he was as restless as before, and in 1810 we again find him in Paris, and again obliged, by the unsettled state of Europe, to forego his long cherished visit. He returned to his own country; but the fever that still burned as in the ardour of youth, was not allayed, and the idea that his dreams of Italy were never to be realized, seemed, as he tells us, to darken the cloud which hung over the prospect of death itself. For a number of years the duties required by a large family forbade his separation from them; but these at length permitted the gratification of his wishes, and patronised by the liberality of several gentlemen of New-York, at the age of fifty-one he was able to gratify a desire which had not failed to increase with his years. The narrative of his tour, which occupied nearly two years, is embraced in this volume. His main object was to examine the celebrated works of Italian art, and to select, for the employment of his pencil, some of the most excellent pictures of the great masters which are preserved in Rome and Florence; the copies of these carefully made cannot fail to advance, among the artists and amateurs of his own country, a correct knowledge of the fine arts.

With his thoughts and his pursuits directed chiefly to this object, we find in the volume before us, no pretension and little attention to antiquarian research, or classical allusion, which have been so generally called forth by the mouldering monuments, and the familiar scenes connected with the history and poetry of earlier days. Neither do we meet with the elaborate reflections on the political or social state of Italy, in the present day. It is true, the remarks of Mr. Peale are not confined to works of art, for he could not shut his eyes to the scenes among which he had to pass, and he was not uninfluenced by a general curiosity and love of truth;-but they are the notes of a transient observer, whose mind was turned to other things. Yet they are found not unfrequently to convey lively impressions of the state of society and manners, and of the local peculiarities of Italy.

Having sailed from New-York, Mr. Peale arrived at Paris, in the month of December, 1828. After a short stay there, merely sufficient to glance over the principal works of art, and to regret the altered situation of the magnificent gallery of Napoleon, deprived of the matchless memorials of his conquests, he continued his journey towards the south of France. Passing through Lyons, the route continued a long way on the border of the rapid Rhone, upon which he saw but one vessel,—whilst the road presented a constant procession of wagons. Such a stream in America, between two great cities, would be covered with steam-boats. As the road advanced south, it passed through more abundant vineyards, the verdure of the fields became more extensive, and, on each side, were seen vast orchards of mulberry trees, for the support of silk-worms, tributary to the great manufactories of silk at Lyons. As he approached Marseilles, the milder atmosphere gave evidence of a more genial climate, and the altered costume of the women, of a different people-to the caps common after leaving Paris, was now added a piece of black silk, of the size and shape of a plate laid on the top of the head; and, in the immediate vicinity of the town, the women wore black hats, with small round crowns and broad rims. Marseilles is a large and bustling sea-port, with but little to detain those who are in search of the productions of Italian art. Instead of pursuing the route he had intended, by Aix and Genoa, Mr. Peale here embarked in a Neapolitan ship, and, after a stormy and uncomfortable passage of ten days, found himself in the magnificent Bay of Naples. Four weeks were devoted to an examination of the works of art in the various galleries, palaces, and churches;-and most of the curiosities, the objects which attract an inquisitive traveller, were examined. Among the latter may be mentioned the catacombs of Santa Maria della Vita, which are thus described:

"Descending into the valley of houses, and then rising to the foot of a neighbouring hill, we entered the court yard of a vast hospital for the poor; an establishment made by the French, in which are men, women, and girls, each class being kept separate and made to work. Here an old man presented himself who officiated as an experienced guide, furnished with a lantern and great flambeau made of ropes impregnated with some kind of resin. A little back lane conducted us to a kind of grotto, containing an altar ornamented with several marble medallions, which are said to have been sculptured by the early Christians. This chapel served as an entrance to the chambers of the dead, which consist of long, winding, and intricate passages, cut out of the tufa rock; in pro. curing which, for the purposes of building, these vast subterranean excavations were originally made, and afterwards used as depositories of the dead. During the persecutions against the early Christians, they were occupied by them either secretly as places of residence, where they might practise their worship unmolested, or, by the permission of their pagan persecutors, as abodes of the most humiliating kind, secluded from the light of day. Here our guide, preceding us with his smoking torch, which he occasionally struck on the walls, so as to scatter off a radiating flood of sparks which left him a brighter flame, showed us the little lateral recesses in which the humble believers were contented to lie, and shelves, excavated in the rock, in which their mortal remains were deposited after death. He pointed out the larger chambers, somewhat decorated with columns and arches in faint relief, in which the priests resided; the places where altars stood; and, in a higher excavation, raised his torch to a rude recess, or sunken balcony above the arched passage, whence the word was preached to the faithful below in a hall of great width. The chambers occupied by the most distinguished characters were denoted by better sculpture, Mosaic incrustations, and fresco paintings. We followed the windings of these subterranean corridors to a great extent, till we reached a hall which was said to be a quarter of a mile in height; but whether contrived for the purpose of ventilation, or as a shaft for raising the stone, we could not ascertain, any more than we could the accuracy of our guide's information, that the bodies of hundreds of martyrs were thrown down there by their pagan murderers, whence they were conveyed by their surviving friends into the niches prepared for them. From these remote parts, passages, now closed, were formerly open, which communicated with other catacombs and villages for sixteen miles round, affording the inmates, it is said, the means of escaping the persecutions which, from time to time, fell upon a sect so obnoxious to the pagan priesthood.

"We found the bones in these catacombs in excellent preservation, and on many the flesh of fifteen hundred years was still of such tenacious though pliant fibre, that it required a sharp knife to cut off a piece. The guide showed us the heads of some of those early Christians, with the tongues still remaining in them, but would not permit us to take one away. Here lived the venerated St. Januarius, whose particular cell was pointed out to us; and to these retreats was his dead body borne after his martyrdom, though some ancient painters represent him walking back with his head in his hands.

"We then visited the church of Santa Maria della Vita; it is an old and curious edifice, rich in marbles, and remarkable for the style of the grand altar, which is constructed over another one, as on a bridge, to which you rise by two lateral flights of steps, ornamented with elegant ballustrades of costly marbles. The old monk showed us, behind the altar, an ancient painting of the Madonna, resembling an Indian, and a precious door to a case containing some sacred relic; but as we did not seem interested in these, he proceeded to open a door in the side wall, and requested us to walk in. To our surprise it was the entrance to another series of catacombs, in which were deposited the dead within the last two hundred years. These were placed in perpendicular niches in the rock, and plastered up, leaving only a part of the head projecting; the men with their faces out, the women with their faces in, only exposing the backs of their heads, from which the hair had long since fallen. By scraping away the plaster, some of the skeletons appeared in their whole extent, among which was an extraor dinary one of a man about eight feet tall. The plaster which covers these bodies, VOL. IX. NO. 18. 66