in faith and obedience, as often and with as much delight, as I have trodden the allegorical one in fancy and imagination. Such were the scenes in which I grew up; so the foundations of my mind were laid. As Sancho boasted that all his family were old Christians, that is, Spaniards without any mixture of Moorish blood; so may I say that I am descended maternally and paternally from genuine Puritans. This is the true nobility of New England. I nursed Puritan milk, drew Puritanical air, read Puritanical books, received Puritanical doctrines, was formed amidst Puritanical manners, and, when I go to the grave, shall sleep in the recesses which inclose Puritanical dust, until the morning of the resurrection. Have I not then some reason to call myself THE PURITAN? But I see the shade of Arrogance pass before me, and I must stop For search, and you shall find humility THE PURITAN. No. 2. His pen is taken from a bird of light, Nicholas Noyes to Cotton Mather. THOUGH my grandfather's library was very small, and confined to a few books of a theological cast, yet I shall always remember with gratitude, that, in the town of Bundleborough, there was a social library, selected by the worthies of the place, in which my grandfather owned a share. Here I first met with the Spectator; and it was one of the first books which strongly arrested my attention. Criticism with me is a very simple affair. Whatever powerfully impresses my heart, and cleaves to my memory, I pronounce good, without stopping to inquire on what principles it pleases, or by what rules it is written. Addison is not merely the painter of manners; he draws his characters and observations often from the depths of the heart. Though some have seen fit to represent him as a secondary writer, tame and inefficient, compared with the great masters of our passions, yet I must conceive that he has some of the same witchery of genius, which is found in John Bunyan. I would not say that John Bunyan is equal to Addison, but I would say that Addison is sometimes equal to John Bunyan. I judge from youthful impressions; and I must say that the vision of Mirza, with its enchanted rock, its musical shepherd, its great valley and rolling flood, excited, in my mind, some of those mystic feelings with which I accompanied the harassed pilgrim, in his journey from this world to that which is to come. Every one must allow, I think, that some of his characters for satire, are drawn with the same spirit as that which formed a Talkative or By-ends. In short, Addison, playful and gentle as he is, sometimes takes the highest flights of genius; and has diversified his pictures of life with wonderful truth and boundless fertility of invention. It would be impossible to crown the urn of Shakspeare with a single flower which would not throw its fragrance around the tomb of Addison.* There cannot also be imagined a more agreeable mode of writing, than that which was adopted by him * That is, so far as describing life and manners is concerned. Addison, in his poetry or prose, has very little of that gilding fancy, that witchcraft of diction, which, in Shakspeare's creative garden, tips with silver all the fruit tree tops. and his associates. By whom the method of publishing in short papers was invented, I am not able to say; it lies, I believe, between Steele and Addison. But every wise man knows that the great secret of profiting mankind is, to gain their attention, to reach their understanding through their curiosity, their amusement, or their passions. In ancient times this was done by the drama, and sometimes by the voice of the popular orator. But the drama exaggerates, and a popular orator is not the production of every century. Those little papers, those short, lively representations, which Addison has invented or used, are like the invisible seeds, scattered by the summer winds; they fly everywhere, and bear fruit in the remotest corners of the earth. The Spectator is one of the books faithful to nature; but it certainly presents us nature in a local and peculiar dress. Its moral representations may be compared to the plates or pictures, which sometimes accompany the older editions. The persons have the shape, features, eyes, noses of other human beings, in all ages and all parts of the globe. But they are somewhat disguised, (at least to a modern reader,) by the hooped petticoats and flowing wigs of the age of queen Anne. The manners of old England and New England are different. We have here no titled aristocracy; no married woman enjoying a jointure; no fashionable coquette stipulating for pinmoney; no beaux rolling in chariots, or wearing a bag wig, with a golden hilted sword. Our comparatively rich man has not a troop of tenants, who bow in double ranks to his worship as he leaves the church, and receive his hams and plum-porridge on the Christmas holydays. The middle ranks of life present a class of people very different from what is known or imagined in England. Now, though a beautiful statue, in a gothic dress, may still present the great outlines of nature, yet somewhat incumbered by these out-dated accompaniments, so, it seems, the most faithful exhibitions of human life, lose some of their beauty to please, and power to instruct, by being disguised in a system of obsolete and unknown manners. This, to be sure, is no fault of the author, but it is the misfortune of the book. I am not sure that this foreign dress in the picture presented, does not diminish the moral effect. Every man's duty in part arises from his station; and that may be moderation and frugality in an English nobleman, which would be pride and profusion in a Yankee farmer. Besides, there is an aspiring after imaginary grandeur; an apish attempt to mimic impossible modes of life, which springs up unconsciously in their minds, who fasten their attention more on the drapery than the essential figure. "La!" said a lady in Connecticut to one of her companions, after reading a British novel, well sprinkled over with personages from high life, "I have been so long conversing with duchesses and marquises, that it |