seems quite an act of condescension to speak to you." This speech, to be sure, was made half ludicrously, but it paints the heart. Even some of the characters drawn in the Spectator, are not the original productions of nature, though they are polished monuments of the nice observation and boundless genius of the author. The truth is, there are two classes of characters before us in the living world-primary and secondary characters; those who act from the eternal principles of nature, and those who act from nature modified by station, by fortune, by accident, by place or time. Nay, both these ingredients are sometimes blended in the same man. Cromwell, for instance, must have been a dissembler and an ambitious man in all ages and places; but it was only in his own time, that he could have wept before he deceived, and prayed amidst his carnage. It is the business of an author to describe the world as it lies before him; to paint both these forms -the superficial manners and secret natures of men. It is no reproach to Addison, that he does not always dive into the depths of nature, for the lineaments of the heart. He has mixed, as he ought to have done, the transient and permanent in one variegated piece. I remember that the author of the Peep at the Pilgrims, has attempted to make Peregrine White, a kind of Will Wimble. But in New England, Will Wimble would be an impossible character. We may have just such hearts, but we want the manners which shape them to their last result. We may have just such water in our rivers, as flowed in the Nahr Ibrahim; but we want the red ochre in our tinctured soil, which converted its mirific streams into the blood of Adonis. The truth is, New England is inhabited by a rising people, with manners as rough as their native rocks, but with hearts comparatively as pure as their inland streams. Every man here has been the artificer of his own fortune. We have but few gentlemen among us, if to that word we are to attach the European idea. The revolutionary war, which called away all the pensioners of the crown, such as the Hutchinsons, the Olivers, and the Jacksons, effectually sifted the land of all such pageants, and left us the instruments of republican simplicity. It is evident that such a people must form their manners on their own exigencies. As there are plants on our soil whose hue and fragrance are unknown to Great Britain; as there are winds which sweep over our mountains more cold and more bracing than the gales of Cornwall or Somersetshire, so, I believe, there are characters and modes of life, which some native author might describe with effect. pocket mirror to a very humble scene. Leaving to our mother land their crowns and coronets, their titles and honors, let us describe our deacons and We wish to hold up a little our cornfields, our rugged mountains and our native streams, our liberty and its excesses, our faults and follies, our virtue and happiness. In fair Columbia's realms, how changed the plan; Sees no superior stalk the happy plain : Dwight's Epistle to Humphreys. P. S. The reader will perceive that in speaking of the Spectator, I have said very little of Steele—all its glory belongs to Addison. Well might the former have treated the latter with all the servility of friendship; for his leader bore him on his more powerful wing; and notwithstanding what has been said of his pathos, if Addison had not existed, Steele would never have been known; the difference between them was almost as great as that between Johnson and Boswell. THE PURITAN. No. 3. Let historians give the detail of our charters, the succession of our several governors and of their administrations; of our political struggles and of the foundatian of our towns: let annalists amuse themselves with collecting anecdotes of the establishment of our modern provinces: eagles soar highI a feebler bird, cheerfully content myself with skipping from bush to bush, and living on insignificant insects. Farmer's Letters. IN the town of Bundleborough I have already remarked, there was a well selected social library, containing some of the most approved books of European authors. In my youthful days, America had made but little progress towards acquiring a literature of her own. Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, and the rebusses and anagrams of Mather's Magnalia, comprised about all the poetry of native growth that was found in my grandfather's library. But the social library supplied the deficiencies of the domestic one; and indeed contained some books, which, I have often wondered how my grandfather, strict as he was in his own theological principles, could admit among his inmates. There was one book, which had a most disastrous influence on my dear aunt Hannah. It was Sir Charles Grandison. I verily believe that Harriet Byron's matrimonial felicity, made my aunt an old maid. Hannah Oldbug was already verging to some of her latest blooms, when my earliest recollections are associated with her fate. I shall never forget her kindness to me—how she used to hear me say all Dr. Watts's hymns for children before retiring to bedmake me a turnover every Thanksgiving day-tie the little black ribbon around my Sunday-collar, before I went to meeting-comb my head before I went to school, and perform all the offices of a watchful and affectionate mother. She had one of the warmest hearts that ever beat beneath a female bosom; and, had she been left to the influence of her Bible and catechism, she might have lived and died contented and in peace. But she had a heart too susceptible to be exposed with safety to the fires of overwrought genius; and Richardson, I suspect, who, in his grave will always continue to speak, robbed her of her lover and her mental tranquillity. It is for this reason I have always had (except in one short interval of my life) a mortal aversion to long winded novels; I could never afford to cry over more than ten pages at a sitting. I shall never forget the day when I was packed off |