footsteps. They illuminate a ground which we have often trod; we know of course how to dispose of such lights to advantage, and, by their assistance, to dissipate from the bypaths and recesses, that which before we dared not venture to approach. To him who has never surveyed the subject before, this light glares with a momentary lustre, and speedily retires like lightning into the cloud whence it emerges. It was ever Brown's favourite creed, that man was competent to perform any thing which Providence had placed in the grasp of human attainment, and that genius and ambition were terms synonimous. We might successfully contest the orthodoxy of this, but the argument would lead us wide from our present inquiry. Brown acted however, on the full persuasion of its truth, and he has left behind him a noble monument of what industry and ambition, as he would term it, are capable of accomplishing. Dr. Johnson recommends in the warmest terms, that every author should fix in his own mind, a visionary standard of perfection; it served to enlarge his ideas, to stimulate effort, and to preserve the intellectual faculties in a constant state of excitation. Lord Nelson, as his recent biographer informs us, reduced this principle to another purpose, and formed to himself an image of heroic glory, which he constantly aspired after. It was always glittering before his grasp, still gently receding and leading the hero on through danger, jeopardy, and death. At the Nile it sparkled with redoubled brilliance; at Trafalgar he grasped it and expired, and like a rainbow it now encircles his urn. A height of excellence alike visionary and inaccessible, taught Brown habitually to disregard his own efforts. All his writings he considered as beneath his ambition to admire, when he compared them with this standard of action. He only exulted in his performances when he believed they approximated nearer to that idol of his fancy, than his preceding efforts had carried him. Authors of this cast, are by far the severest critics on their own works; they will discover blemishes which to an ordinary eye, will appear to be beauties, and their blemishes and defects are alike incentives to still further exertions. This is the true end of our being, to husband what little of life remains to the best advantage, and to make the industry of the latter part of it, in

some measure to atone for the indolence of the former. The early style of Brown's writings was characterized by its diffusiveness, the ordinary fault of men of letters. By avoiding obscurity, they present the same idea in such a variety of light, it loses the charm of novelty, and is dissipated by the very attempts to render it more obvious. The frequent exercise of the pen, and the pruning of its luxuriance overcame this defect, and his style was afterwards noted for its uncommon strength and energy. The wonders and prodigies with which his early efforts abound, are all wonders and prodigies sui generis. Disgusted with the dull insipid tales of the German school, the ghosts, the castles, and the hobgobblins of modern romance, he searched the mysterious volume of nature, and found prodi. gies more to his liking. Somnambulism and ventriloquism, furnished fields equally large and commodious for fancy to expatiate in, and capable of the same embellishment of incident. The facts may all be true, and whether true or not, they partake of more novelty and nature than all the monsters that Germany can produce. No man delighted to wander more than Brown did in the regions of the marvellous; no man more heartily despised those novelists who, to produce novelty, put human nature on the rack. His choice of incident had all the novelty of action without being liable to the strong objection to which German wonders are liable, that such novelties do not exist in nature. We still enjoy the society of flesh and blood, in the midst of all these marvellous events, and see nothing done but what a human agent is capable of doing.

Authors who deal so much in spectres, ghosts and hobgoblins, probably are not aware that while they profess reverence for novelty, they follow the most beaten and ordinary track of writing. They revive that species of the incredible, so justly exploded by the christian religion, which the poets, under the system of heathen mythology, indulged in, with so much freedom and success. A modern ghost is to all intents and purposes, an adequate representative of Jupiter, Mars, and the other heathen deities, whose presence was indispensibly requisite to save their respective heroes from danger and death. When the

writer's imagination was jaded in quest of an expedient, it was marvellous indeed, if supernatural power was incompetent to furnish one. Brown justly exploded this antique novelty, and as before remarked, if his agents are allowed to act, his novelties partake nothing of the incredible. He never himself, regarded his novels in a scrious light; he considered them as the sportive effusions of his juvenile pen, and yet these compositions, written on the spur of the occasion, and when written abandoned by their author without regret, have been read, republished in England, and admired. Like hardy children, disclaimed by their parent, and thrown on the world for support, they have bravely scrambled through every opposing obstacle, and hardily acquired competence and reputation for themselves. But Brown's peculiar and characteristic merits, are founded on a much broader base. Almost every science has received the tribute of his pen, and the same characteristic novelty is attendant on whatever he wrote. Questions of literature or policy, that had been the debate of public writers until ingenuity itself seemed exhausted, and if we may be allowed the expression, worn to the bone in the research, when touched by his pen, started up with some glittering novelty of appearance, and received a sort of resuscitation from the touch. The public read, always amused, always delighted, and oftentimes convinced, when they had entertained a firm belief that not only argument, but what was by far more copious and redundant, abuse also had been exhausted. It was the peculiar trait of this writer, to take a ground of investigation exclusively his own. Such was the strength aud luminous perspicuity of his style, such his plausible arrangement of facts, such his skill and adroitness in maintaining his position, whatever that position was, that those not convinced by his argument, found it difficult either to question his hypothesis, or to resist his deductions. The fortress was often strong and impregnable to assault, although the country which it commanded was not always worth the skill and ingenuity manifested in the construction of the engineer. In those occasional sallies of a mind always exuberant, never did the motto applied by Horne Tooke, to the productions of Junius, more forcibly apply, "materies superat

at opus." These may be called the truant pastime of his pen; and even in the recreative moments of the author's mind, we discerned the vigour and elasticity of its sinews. The games of Greece and Rome were unquestionably political institutions. By those mock encounters, the youth acquired a hardihood of muscle, skill, dexterity, and strength for attack or defence, whenever their country demanded services more hazardous and important. With this view, Brown seems in his lighter essays, to have disciplined and invigorated his genius. He thought whatever was done, should be well done; that the intrinsic and comparative insignificance of the task to be performed, was no apology for want of skill and dexterity in the artist. Pastime was thus employed to the invigoration of his genius, to render it subservient for exercise more arduous and impracticable. His country had already began to reap the benefit of such talents so disciplined; his mind, to use Shakspeare's beautiful expression was now "flowing in more formal majesty." The cloud which had oppressed his early years had now become splendid and luminous, and rapidly departing before the rising beams, when suddenly the orb became dark in the meridian maturity of his blaze. I propose, Mr. Editor, to examine this point more at large in a subsequent number of your miscellany.

A. R.

N. B. A biography of Charles B. Brown, and a selection from his manuscripts, are about to be published. The profits of the work will be exclusively applied to the family of the deceased. The work will be comprised in two volumes. We have not the smallest doubt that the pen of a writer, whose works are deemed worthy of a publication in England, wil! receive a liberal patronage in his native country.

ZERAH COLBURN.

DURING several weeks, we have repeatedly received astonishing and almost incredible accounts of the mathematical powers of a child living in Vermont. Within the last month, he has been exhibited in this place, and we have had frequent and ample opportunities for examining him; and have besides, collected from the father, and from respectable gentlemen in that part of the country where this prodigy was born, the following account of his birth and education.

Zerah Colburn was born at Cabot in the county of Caledonia, and state of Vermont, on the first day of September 1804. In the early part of his infancy, and until he was a year old, his parents considered him very much inferior to the rest of their children, and sometimes fearfully anticipated all the trouble and sorrow attendant on the maintenance of an idiot. By degrees he seemed to improve, and they began to conceive better hopes; but, he was more than two years old before he was supposed to possess that degree of intelligence which usually falls to the share of our species. After this, his progress became more apparent; and although all who saw him declared he was very eccentric in his manners and amusements, yet all acknowledged that he was shrewd and intelligent. No one, however, had yet discovered in him any inclination to the combinations of arithmetic, and no one remembers that he ever made any inquiries about numbers, or their use. As he always lived in a frontier town of Vermont, where education meets with little encouragement, and as his father's resources were few and trifling, he had received no instruction, and was in fact ignorant of the first rudiments of reading. It was, therefore, with unqualified astonishment, that his father overheard him multiplying different sums merely for his own amusement; and on investigating the extent of his powers, found he could multiply any two numbers under one hundred. This happened about the beginning of last August. Immediately on this discovery, the father sent him to a woman's school, such as is usually kept in our back settlements during the summer season. There he remained until the latter