1844.]

Editor's Table.

out its neck, and closes its eyes. Its master then knows that all is over. He dismounts, and without an attempt to make it rise-for he knows the honesty of its nature, and never suspects it of deception or laziness- he removes the saddle, places it on the back of another dromedary, and departs, abandoning the one that is no longer able to accompany him. When night approaches, the jackals and hyenas, attracted by the scent, come up and attack the poor animal, till nothing is left but the skeleton. We are now on the highway from Cairo and Mecca: twice a year the caravans go and return by this route; and these bones, so numerous and so constantly replenished, that the tempests of the desert can never entirely disperse them; these bones which, without a guide, would lead you to the oases, the wells and fountains, where the Arab finds shade and water, and would end by conducting you to the tomb of the prophet; these bones are those of dromedaries which perish in the desert.'

'WHILE I was writing that last sentence, a flea, not like that which appeared upon St. DOMINIC's book in the disguise of the devil, but a flea of real flea-flesh and blood, partly fleablood and partly mine, which the said flea had flea-feloniously appropriated to himself by his own process of flea-botomy, appeared upon the manuscript before me.' Our own case exactly; and thereupon we bethought us of a certain Ode,' sent us last month by the accomplished author of Hints on Etiquette.' It is preceded by an explanatory' puff' from the 'Southwestern Tomahawk, or Texan Hatchet of Freedom: The following poetical effusion has been attributed to HANNAH MORE; a fact which we for our parts do n't doubt; for if not hers, whose can it be?-the style, the allusions so felicitous, the poetical retribution hinted at-above all, the subject? Beside, there's her name to it! WE at least have faith, which, as every body knows, can do wonders :'

Fleas are not lobsters, d-n their souls!'- SIR JOSEPH BANKS.

HAIL to thee, merry flea!

Thou art crustaceous,

And predacious;

But oh! good gracious!

How audacious!

Poking thy crooks
Into nooks

Where such bold things
Should never go;
Polished, 't is true,
Case-harden'd too,
A jolly rover

The bed-room over;
Give us thy flipper,

Thou pirate skipper!

'England and America' is not an article suited to our pages. It is certainly forcibly writLet the strollten, but it exhibits a sad lack of good taste, to say nothing of good feeling. ing travellers from abroad, who occasionally visit us from unworthy motives, say what they please of our country and our people. We are all the while living down their calumnies or misrepresentations, and they themselves will perhaps live long enough to regret them. As for their ridiculous vauntings of national superiority,' again we say, let them vaunt; it is a liberty which we enjoy, and truth to say, do not stint ourselves in exercising. Whatever strengthens local attachments,' writes one who was a friend of mankind, is favorable both to individual and national character. Our home, our birth-place, our native land—think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words; and if thou hast any intellectual eyes, thou wilt then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism. Show me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will show you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself. Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold upon a human being whose affections are without a root.' Dr. ADAM CLARKE, one of the greatest divines connected with the Wesleyans, in the last volume of his travels, thus apostrophises his country: 'O, England! decent abode of comfort and cleanliness, and decorum! O, blessed asylum of all that is worth having upon earth! O, sanctuary of religion and of

liberty for the whole civilized world! It is only in viewing the state of other countries that thy advantages can be duly estimated! May thy sons who have fought the good fight' but know and guard what they possess in thee! O, land of happy firesides, and cleanly hearths, and domestic peace! of filial piety, and parental love, and connubial joy! The cradle of heroes, the school of sages, the temple of law, the altar of faith, the asylum of innocence, the bulwark of private security and of private honor!

'Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,

My heart, untravell'd, fondly turns to thee!

Now this may seem to some an exhibition of clouded amor patriæ; but we confess we regard the writer's enthusiasm for his own country as honorable to his heart. What man would honor an American less, for expressing with kindred fervor his deep affection for his own, his native land?'. LET us hope that in the pages of our present number

there will be found something to every body's liking, and all good of its kind :

'AN orchard bearing several trees,
And fruits of several taste.'

The Experiences of a Tobacco-Smoker' will suggest to the lover of the Indian weed, especially to the neophyte in its use, some important truths. The very style of the essay illustrates one or two of the arguments employed by the writer. What a 'clincher' to his main demonstration is the Greek distich with which he closes! YELLOWPLUSH orthography in the original' of Old KING COLE! Our friend 'NED BUNTLINE' will always be welcome; and those who read the capital sketch of Running the Blockade' will have no need to ask why. The Visit to Mount Ida,' from the pen of our esteemed correspondent at Constantinople, will arrest the attention and sustain the interest of the reader. It is pleasant to peruse these accounts of places and events made ever famous in Holy Writ and in classic story. As we read, we think of the wanderings of the Apostle PAUL,

and of the scenes and deeds, the record of which is so happily condensed by SHAKSPEARE in his prologue to Troilus and Cressida :'

'IN Troy there lies the scene. From isles of Greece

The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
Have to the port of Athens sent their ships,
Fraught with the ministers and instruments
Of cruel war; sixty and nine, that wore
Their crownets regal, from the Athenian bay
Put forth toward Phrygia; and their vow is made
To ransack Troy; within whose strong immures
The ravish'd Helen, Menelaus' queen,

With wanton Paris sleeps: and that's the quarrel.
To Tenedos they come;

And the deep-drawing barks do there disgorge
Their warlike fraughtage: now on Dardan plains
The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch
Their brave pavilions: Priam's six-gated city,
Dardan, and Tymbria, Ilias, Chetas, Trojan,
And Antenorides, with massy staples,
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts,
Sperr up the sons of Troy.'

Our friend writes us: It is now the second time that I have paid a visit to Mysia, the first being to Troy and Alexander Troas. I I am in firm belief of the whole classic tale of HOMER, and cannot for a moment conceive how any one could doubt it. HOMER has probably magnified both the size of Troy, the number of its inhabitants, and the besiegers; and yet this may not have been the case, for all Asia-Minor was once densely populated, and so was Greece.' We are promised more of the admirable Turkish Tales and Sketches' of our correspondent, who translates the Oriental tongues with eminent faithfulness, and with the facility acquired by a residence of upward of twenty years in the East. The Turkish must be a very difficult language to render into English. No people pretend to

so much precision in their writings as the Turks. They have not only verbs active, pas. sive, transitive, and reciprocal, but also verbs coöperative, verbs meditative, verbs frequentative, verbs negative, and verbs impossible: and moreover they have what are called verbs of opinion, and verbs of knowledge. The latter are used when the speaker means it to be understood that he speaks of his own sure knowledge, and is absolutely certain of what he asserts; the former when he advances it only as what he thinks likely, or believes upon the testimony of others.' Our friend closes his private note with the following information, in which our readers are interested: 'I have been lately to spend a couple of weeks at Belgrade, made remarkable by the residence there of Lady MONTAGUE. I made a few sketches of the place and its events, and my better half' has drawn it with her pencils. I have made an article of it for your excellent work, which I shall soon send you. Of news I have but little to write you. The recent busy occurrences of the East have at length subsided into 'awful' dull times. Except the revolution, or rather insurrection, of Albania, which also draws to an end, there is nothing stirring. On dit, that the Sultan's youngest sister is soon to be married, when splendid fêtes may be expected; of all which I shall advise you.' Is there not a good deal of pathos - French pathos,' if you please, but yet of a kind to moisten the eye of a merciful and affectionate reader-in the story of 'Bernard and Mouton ? An' we had not thought so, that 'Dog's Tale' had not been served up among our other dishes. The Legend of Count Julian and his Family,' by WASHINGTON IRVING, needs no praise of ours. It is one of the most touching and felicitous of this eminent writer's Spanish sketches. We are indebted to an English friend, himself a 'ready writer,' for the fine lines on The Lost Church,' by the eminent JAMES MONTGOMERY. The cool season brings us back the polished JOHN WATERS, whom we look to find replenished by the idlesse of summer with 'all rare thoughts and pleasant fancies.' See that the Player' be well bestowed in your memory, who Gossips' so agreeably for your entertainment; and if you are a scholar, or whether you be or not, fail not to read the matter-full paper upon the Writings of Vincent Bourne.' It is from the pen of one who, as the 'Country Doctor' and Historian of Tinnecum, has so often exerted himself to please you. For the rest of the number also this latter claim may be honestly preferred. To those whose names (at the kind instance of readers who have known us long and well,) are new upon our subscription-books, we can only say, that we shall use our best endeavors to meet your approbation. We make bold to conclude in the language of one who never promised more than he performed: Place as much confidence in us as you do in your doctor; give us as much credit as you expect from your tailor; and if your doctor deserves that confidence as well, it will be well for you; and if your credit is as punctually redeemed, it will be well for your tailor.' RIDING up Broadway one day in an omnibus, with one of the oldest and most distinguished jurists in this country, we ventured to ask him, why amidst the various improvements of this age, the nomenclature of the law had not been simplified, and rendered more intelligible to the mass.' 'It's intelligible enough,' said he, to those who understand it. We don't want Tom, Dick and Harry to know all about it; if they did, there would be nobody but lawyers! This was a candid confession; and explains why it is that legal papers of every description are amplified with all possible varieties of professional tautology. That crafty politician who said the use of language was to conceal our thoughts,' did not go farther in his theory than the members of the legal profession in their practice; as every paper which comes from their hands may testify, and every court of law bears record. They so smother their meaning with words, so envelop it with technicalities, so bury it beneath redundancies of speech, that any meaning which is sought for may be picked out, to the confusion of that which was intended. You ask for justice and you receive a nice distinction, a forced construction, a verbal criticism. By such means you are defeated and plundered in a civil cause; and in a criminal one, a slip of the pen in the indictment brings off the delinquent scot free.' And all this is necessary for the good of the profession.' Every man his own lawyer' is a chi

VOL. XXIV.

51

mera. BEN JONSON knew this; and he kept one,' he tells us, who made himself generally useful' in his way and the way of his kind:

'My man of law solicits all my causes,

Follows my business, makes and compounds my quarrels
Between my tenants and me; sows all my strifes,

And reaps them too; troubles the country for me,
And vexes any neighbor that I please.'

'HE that bendeth a twig because he would see if it would bow by strength, may chance to have a crooked tree when he would have a straight.' So says an old English writer; and the hint is worthy of heed by those who bend their juvenile 'twigs' to 'incline trees' in manhood, without thought of present consequences. I am sometimes led to think,' observes a friend of boys, in our note-book, 'that pigs are brought up upon a wiser system than lads at a high-school. The pig is allowed to feed upon any thing on which he can thrive, until the time approaches when pig is to commence pork, or take a degree as bacon, and then he is fed daintily. It has appeared to me that boys should not be introduced to the standard works of antiquity, until they are of an age in some degree to appreciate what they read.' In the case of precocious boys, capable, as SIDNEY SMITH has it, of repaying the obligations they owe to their instructors, and of teaching, with grateful retaliation, the old idea how to shoot,' burthens, greater than they can bear, are too often laid upon them. Who would bow the physical frame of a lad with a load too heavy for his young shoulders? Yet how often is the delicate and tender brain of the young tasked beyond its powers of endurance? Fathers and mothers, think on these things!' WE thought of Musquito-Cove' and 'Punkin P'nt' while reading Mr. CLAPP's introduction to the Tales of the Glauber Spa.' 'I have lived at Sheep's Neck,' he writes, ever since I was a boy, and so did my father before me; but we have altered the name lately to 'Glawber Spaw,' and call the Old Ram's Alley Epsom Walk,' out o' a notion o' my daäter's.' They annoyed the old gentleman very much by the manner in which they modernized the old house, to make it a proper place for fashionable visitors at a new and fashionable spring: When it was in order, it was such a trumpery-looking place that I could n't spit in it with any comfort!... PROBABILITY rather favors the conclusion, that if our Boston friend could be aware how sorely we are bethumped with words while reading our fine-type proof-sheets at the printing-office, he would overlook the trifling error at which he carps. Perhaps while we are reading sixteen of these pages a lad is performing the same operation aloud for the pages of some half a dozen different works. Indeed, overcome by the wordy din, we have just paused to jot down what has fallen upon our ear while reading this very sheet. First came a tale of distress in a Norwegian settlement of Wisconsin, taken from a poorly-paid gospel-messenger's report to the Home Missionary' journal:

'I VISITED one family in which I found every individual, eight in number, prostrated with disease. Two of them, the father, and daughter of some sixteen years of age, were then shaking violently with the ague. The daughter shoeless, and both nearly destitute of all clothing, stood hovering over a few live coals, by the side of which stood an old filthy looking copper tea-kettle, from the spout of which they would take their turns in drinking. The others were huddled together into bunks filled with prairie hay, with nothing over them to shelter them from the rigorous cold of a December day, save a few sheep-skins sewed together. Aside from the tea-kettle we saw but one article of furniture, and that a wooden bowl, partly filled with what I took to be shorts, kneaded and prepared for baking. This, as near as I could learn, was all they had in the house with which to support life. In another family I found the sick mother in bed with her dying husband, with no one to administer to their necessities, or even to speak a word of consolation to them, save two little girls of some seven and nine years of age. Before the fire stood a little naked child, reduced to a skeleton, and having every appearance of being literally starved; for, so far as could be judged, no disease was preying upon it. At another hut where the physician called, he found a dead man lying upon a bench out of doors, and teu sick ones, some of whom were dying, in doors. These are by no means isolated cases. They are just what might have been witnessed almost any day during the last winter.'

BEFORE the thought of this 'true tale of distress' is out of the mind, scraps from the proof-sheet of a Nursery-Catalogue are creeping in at the ear; consisting of the names and qualities of fruit-trees, in long abbreviated columns; as for example: 'Heart-Cherries;

Adam's Crown; pale red; round-heart; tender; early June; much esteemed;'Ansell's Black-heart; oval-heart; tender; beginning of June; very beautiful, rich, sweet, excellent; Early Red Pentecost; dark-red; obtuse-heart; juicy; middle of June; early, flesh and juice dark red, luscious honied sweetness;' and so on, in endless iteration of name, color, form, size, quality, texture, season, and so forth, of all manner of trees, bearing all manner of fruits:' then a table of squares, cubes, roots, from a work on Mathematics, in interminable columns, is sung figure-atively through juvenile nose, as: Three, dot, six, nought; five, four, seven, nine, two,' and so on, ad infinitum. But hark! what sounds are these we hear' next? It is the voice of a lad, spelling a leaf in the Mohawk Testament. The language is 'nervous but inelegant,' although it is in the admirably-written' Acts of the Apostles' that he is reading:

'NE wahhonny raweghniserarakwenh, ne o-nenh denthayadoreghdune ne jiyonghwenjade ne atdakwarighsyonghtserakonh koak hihhayadare roanhha shakorighwakwadakwennyh; koak niyuriware enghshakowy norighwiyuonweh nakwekonh nonkwehhokoukeh, cndewerheke raonhha wahhy shoketskweuh jirawenhheyonghue. Neoui ne o-nenh ro-nathonde ne ne jiyon ketskwaghs ne yakawenhheyonh, ottyake wahhhonwaghsteriste: nok notyakeshon wairon, Enkwadahhonghsadade wahhy are ne ken-ikenh ji-nikarihhodenh.'

This is rather sharp practice; and the boy welcomes the waiting proof-sheet of the Corporation Laws, dry though they be, with a sense of relief; and straitway we learn that

"THE said Contractors shall, at their own expense, severally provide a sufficient number of sloops, scows or vessels, to receive as fast as collected, all the manure, filth, garbage, ofïal, dirt, cinders, ashes, and rubbish of whatever nature or description, from their respective districts: and as fast as the same shall be taken up or collected into the carts, they shall, at their own expense, carry away to their respective dumping-grounds, and forthwith deposit, or in the course of each and every day, in each year, shall put the same on board of such vessel or vessels, and at their own expense remove the same from the city, as often as once in every three days.'

This section' from the ordinance respecting street-cleaning is followed by another entertaining proof-sheet, which is full of 'sections' of quite a different kind, being those of house-carpentry:

'FIND the stretch-out, e f of a c b, from o, through the point of the mitre at the newel-cap, draw es; obtain on the tangent, e d, the position of the points, s and h, as at t and ƒ; from e tf, and f, draw ex, tu, fg and ƒh, ail at right angles to e d; make e g equal to one rise and ƒg equal to 12, as this line is drawn through from the 12 riser; from g g, draw g i, make g x equal to about three-fourths of a rise; draw z u, at right angles to e z, and ease off the angle atu; at a distance equal to the thickness of the rail. draw v w y, parallel to zui; from the centre of the plan, o, draw o l, at right angles to e d; bisect h nin p, and through p, at right angles to gi;'' and so forth and cetera.'

Now if our correspondent, while trying to read a proof, should have all these several matters, one after another, droned into his unwilling ear, we rather think he would find a little palliation for an occasional error; especially one so very trifling as that which he has taken the trouble to indicate and to animadvert upon. THE rebuke of a friend,'

says an old proverb, 'is good for the soul.' We thought of the apothegm while reading a ' rebuke' contained in a kindly and flattering notice of our last number, in the Courier and Enquirer' daily journal. But we were misconceived. We intended no 'attack upon a large body of professing Christians' in our animadversions upon the unchristian logic, and the illiberal distinctions drawn by an eastern polemical journal. 'After the straitest sect' of the denomination alluded to, we ourselves have lived. Early education; the example of paternal and maternal relations, in near and distant removes;' all are against such a demonstration on our part. Nevertheless, we do hold that he who forbids or discourages the enjoyment of the religious sentiment' in those who have not been able to claim that they have been born again,' according to the terms of a particular creed, is not in our judgment a true follower of his MASTER nor a true friend of his race. The law of GOD,' says the lamented LARNED, himself an honored member of the religious persuasion in question, 'is only beneficence acting by rule, and has not the most distant design of retrenching the sphere of human happiness.' Mr. WILLIS, who was brought up at the feet of Christian professors, in this kind, and was himself one among them, adverts with truth and feeling to