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 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. streams. 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 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. We wish to hold up a little 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 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 |