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when he hints that Shakspeare, and Milton, and Newton are not prized in America as they are in England, and especially if in marking his last sentence in inverted commas, he means to have it understood that he has found that passage in any American authority, then we take leave to say that his remark borders hard upon that species of fiction, which is not thought particularly becoming a man of veracity; and instead of being in any degree borrowed from American writers, is an amplification, neither very ingenious nor very neat, of a passage in an Edinburgh Review on the subject of our country. As for the rest it is of course mere caricature. There is hardly as much justice in it, as there would be in the following humble parody. The characteristic vanity of the English nation springs from an extraordinary and unusual source. Other nations boast of what they are or hope, in the natural progress of things, to be; an Englishmen boasts of glories which are faded, and ages which are gone by. For that natural complacence, which a man has a right to feel, in the fruit of his own labors, the success of his own efforts, and the happy consequences of institutions, to the formation of which he has himself contributed, a Briton carries you back to an ancestry, from which he has degenerated, and to an inheritance which he has squandered and lost. He suspends his habeas corpus, and tells you he is the champion of liberty, because Hampden would not pay the ship money, and he turns out his dragoons on an unarmed populace, and quotes you the glorious provisions of the bill of rights. Others appeal to futurity, and rejoice in the train of blessings, of which they have done all they can to insure the succession; an Englishman's glories are laid up in the records of the herald's office, and he goes to the antiquary and the historian for something to be proud of. An American bids you look at the rulers, which he has chosen to rule over him, and who will therefore consult his welfare; a Briton reminds you of the brave barons of Runnymede. Other nations in decline assume a grave and chastised manner, and say little of glory or greatness; an Englishman tells you of the days when his "highness in his infancy was crowned in Paris." Address a thriving citizen of Abergele by the title of mister, and he will tell you the glorious tale of the Morva Rudlan, or lead you back to the illustrious era of Caractacus. Other nations boast of the literature they have or the taste which is maturing among them; an Englishman, with O'Keefe and Reynolds on

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but an Englishman goes down to the shades, and evokes the dark and misty spirits of the ages that were.'

In all this and much more, which the ingenious hints of the New Monthly Magazine might suggest, we honestly profess there is not the shadow of justice, and we feel almost ashamed of ourselves for indulging in it. We mean it as a pendant for his own absurd picture of American vanity. One thing we ought to thank him for, could we possibly believe that it did not proceed from oversight. In saying that our vanity is prospective, that other nations boast of what they are or have been, but we of our future grandeur, he acquits us of voluminous. charges of vanity and self-conceit, with which the writings of his countrymen abound. He acquits us of any exultation, at having been the first to exhibit to the world a true model of representative government, of having set the example to mankind of an equal deputation of power in the compound ratio of property and numbers, a principle no more exemplified in the British parliament than in the Turkish divan; he exonerates us from all conceit at the compliments paid by Mr Burke to the enterprize of our citizens, and by Lord Chatham to the wisdom and skill of our statesmen; with all our 'exaggerated self-love,' he acknowledges that we bear meekly the glory of having with most disproportioned means successfully withstood the force of the British Empire, and raised ourselves from the degradation of colonies to a level with the most powerful nations of the earth; he grants that we demand no credit for Franklin and Washington, whose names, says Herder, are those, by which the eighteenth century will be quoted; he gives the lie to all the tales, which have circulated in octavo and quarto, of our being vain of the naval achievements of the late war; and though before the close of his remarks, he forgets himself, and tells us that America is 'do

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ing wonders,' and gives us credit for the formation of a great empire, resembling in its best points the best times of Great Britain;' he acquits us of all vanity and self-gratulation on this flattering score, and gives us credit for the extraordinary selfdenial of appealing to prophecy, and demanding a discount of ready praise for what our posterity are to do in the year 2000. Now if the writer is sincere, we really think that his charge of irritable and exaggerated self-love' is badly made out; that he cannot expect to be believed, when he accuses us of vanity and self-sufficiency; and that he would have better consulted the interests of his argument, to take care how his pleasantry bore upon his logic.

But to argue this point of boasting a little closer, we are not sure, upon the whole, that we Americans have not the better side of the question, even in our writer's own grotesque picture. He tells us that while others appeal to history, we appeal to prophecy, and that while an Englishman boasts of his grandfather, an American boasts of his grandchildren. Mere boasting is no very reputable practice on any score, even that of personal merit ; and the true notion we apprehend to be, to abstain from it altogether, even in reference to excellences, which a man may think he possesses himself. This is peculiarly true of national boasting, or what the rhetoricians call jactatio reipublicæ causâ, because it is ten to one that the man, who takes on himself to be the organ of his countrymen on these occasions, shall be the last in the community entitled to any credit for the alleged excellence. It has but a sorry appearance to see a stupid, common-place, selfish American or Englishman boasting of their Pitts or their Hamiltons, and taking a portion of credit to themselves for talents, they do not share, and for actions they did not accomplish. But inasmuch as merit is personal, and all self-complacency, if excusable at all, is so in proportion as it proceeds from personal merit, we do hold, with all submission, that to boast of our posterity is more rational than to boast of our ancestors, nay of ourselves. What our nation has been, and, in a good degree, what it is, are beyond our control. To our fathers' glory we contributed nothing; and our own institutions, at least in the old countries, do our wisdom and virtue no more credit than the beautiful architecture of a house, built a hundred years

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them down an inheritance unburdened with debt, and with dangerous precedents of power encroaching on right; if we abstain from the sacrifice of our children's happiness to our own ease; if we so administer the republic that those who come after us shall bless our memory; if, disdaining temporary expedients, we can lay claim to the credit of having left the law unincumbered and sovereign, and the practice sound and faithful, and of having laid up more examples to be imitated than errors to be amended, then we think it quite fair, quite natural to appeal to posterity;' then we think we have a right to make 'a prophetic boast,' and that the assurance that some good is likely to come out of what we have done or forborne is a better ground of complacence, than the benefits we have received from our ancestors. It is true the future glory is uncertain, the past is sure: but it is also as sure that the credit of it belongs not to us; and we cannot be so faithless in transmitting our institutions to our descendants, but after all, we imagine we shall do as much for them, as any nation has done for its ancestors. We suppose our writer will set it down to our republican prejudices, and quote it as an instance, that monarchy reads Americé slavery. Yet we always thought that Marius had the better of this argument, and we beg leave to say with him, 'Nunc videte quam iniqui sint. Quod ex aliena virtute sibi arrogant, id mihi ex mea non concedunt; silicet quia imagines non habeo, et quia mihi nobilitas nova est, quam certe peperisse melius est, quam receptam corrupisse.'

But we would not have it thought, from this quotation or any other remark we have made, that we allow ourselves to be carried beyond the bounds of justice and of our own opinion, by a foolish extravagance of retorting. We do not wish to say that we look upon the English nation, as in a state of decline. There are certainly considerable evils in the state of the country. A high authority pronounces the poor rates an evil, which can neither be remedied nor borne, and another authority on the other side equally high, says the corruption of parliament has reached a ruinous point; while the national debt exceeds, by nearly ten times, the amount which Hume declared must produce a bankruptcy. With all this, we believe, we certainly hope, that England will long survive, and exert her present preponderance in the world. Not certainly that we think her influence always brought into action as it ought to be, but because we see not the spot on the map of Europe, to New Series, No. 7. 6

which it could be safely transferred; and because we look upon ourselves to be quite too immature, to engage with prudence, in European politics. England, moreover, has a tower of strength, a great depository of moral and physical power, in her numerous orderly, intelligent, middling class, which the corruptions, that exist in the two extremes of society, have as yet scarcely touched. And ages we trust will pass by, before the happy abodes of this virtuous community, will feel the overwhelming power of political and moral degeneracy and corruption. We wish this for the sake of humanity, order, and peace abroad, of which the English character is certainly the great assurance. Still, however, and it is a topic which for its gravity ought scarcely to find its place in a connexion with our foregoing remarks, we suppose that nothing exempts England from the fate of kingdoms and empires, and that the thousand years which she has stood on the list of the great nations of the earth, must bear some assignable proportion to the period allotted her in the book of providence. We on the contrary are, if this writer pleases, in our infancy; at any rate quite unprepared to hold the scales of European politics. The influence we are to exert upon them hereafter, is a matter of momentous interest, and we think the happiness of the civilized world essentially involved in the turn, which our institutions and character take. It is for these therefore, that our politicians and statesmen ought to labor. Blest with a form of government and a state of society, which do not task to the uttermost all the energies of the state to keep the fabric together, it becomes our enlightened men to look to the future, to build for other times, to fit well together the parts of this great machine, so that the hour shall be long deferred when an ominous crashing shall be heard deep within the enginery, where none can venture in to repair it.

We would revert a moment to another topic of reproach, to which more than one allusion is made by this writer, we mean that of the existence of slavery in this country; a subject which we have already touched. He bids us make no fine speeches of freedom while a slave contaminates our soil,' and something like this was said by our brethren at Edinburgh about the extraordinary incongruity of our principles and practice, in that the clanking of chains and the sound of the scourge are heard beneath the walls of our Congress. Now we certainly shall not allow ourselves to be betrayed into a defence of

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