volumes will not fail to observe that there is a certain spirit of similarity that pervades all American humour; that, for example, at times sly and sarcastic, it is as fond of exposing a presumed simplicity or ignorance, as it is of dressing up an act of cleverness utterly regardless of principlethat it is almost always rude and semi-barbarous; and that, in the narrative line, it is especially prone to the exaggerated and the false. The popularity of the renowned Davy Crockett appears, for example, to be solely connected with Munchausen kind of exploits, couched in American dialect, and adapted to American habits and experiences. There is also a great deal of repetition in these humorous stories; the same joke is often made to tell several times-as we find, for example, the sur reptitious kisses of lovers, made by the half-sleepy dame up-stairs, to undergo, in different stories, a variety of strange and humorous applications. If any one wants, however, to study or to make himself familiar with what American humour is, he cannot do better than consult these truly-characteristic and amusing pages. "My First and Last Speech in the General Court" is an irreproachable sketch, capitally told. The "Widow Rugby's Husband," on the contrary, is a Yankee trait of expediency, regardless of principle, scarcely redeemed by its humour.

Bar (bear) stories are, as may be imagined, particularly numerous, and constitute the great topic of the backwoodsman. "The Big Bear of Arkansas," by T. B. Thorpe, seems to be the most renowned; but the most amusing is, we think, Colonel Crockett's account of his falling down a hollow tree, head foremost, and being drawn out by a bear, holding fast to the stump of his tail with his teeth-an operation that cured him of the toothache. For a bear-story of the true Munchausen character, we need only refer to the feats of Mik-hoo-tah, who, having broken his leg in a bear encounter, gives battle, when well again, to an old grisly bear, and kills him with his bran-new wooden leg, detached for that purpose from the stump, and used as a weapon of bar-destruction.

Here is a brief specimen of American humour, entitled "Yankee Homespun :"

"When I lived in Maine," said Uncle Ezra, I helped to break up a new piece of ground; we got the wood off in the winter, and early in the spring we begun ploughing on't. It was so consarned rocky, that we had to get forty yoke of oxen to one plough-we did, faith-and I held that plough more'n a week; I thought I should die. It e'en a 'most killed me, I vow. Why, one day I was hold'n, and the plough hit a stump, which measured just nine feet and a half through it—hard and sound white oak. The plough split it, and I was going straight throngh the stump, when I happened to think it might snap together again, so I threw my feet out, and had no sooner done this than it snapped together, taking a smart hold of the seat of my pantaloons. Of course I was tight, but I held on to the plough-handles; and though the teamsters did all they could, that team of eighty oxen could not tear my pantaloons, nor cause me to let go my grip. At last, though, after letting the cattle breathe, they gave another strong pull altogether, and the old stump came out about the quickest; it had monstrous long roots, too, let me tell you. My wife made the cloth for them pantaloons, and I haven't worn any other kind since."

The only reply made to this was:

"I should have thought it would have come hard upon your suspenders." "Powerful hard."

Stories of rustic courtship are very numerous, and highly national :

"Lord!" exclaims Johnny Beedle, courting Sally Jones, on the occasion of his first embrace, "did ye ever see a hawk pounce upon a young robin? or a bumble bee on a clover top? I say nothing."

Consarn it, how a buss will crack of a still frosty night! Mrs. Jones was about half way between asleep and awake.

There goes my yeast bottle," says she to herself, "burst into twenty hundred pieces, and my bread is all dough agin."

Billy Warwick relates also of his courtship with Miss Barb'ry Bass: "She trimbl'd, and look'd so pretty, and sed nothin', I couldn't help kissin' her and seein' she didn't say 'quit,' I kissed her nigh on seven or eight times; and as old Miss Bass had gone to bed, and Kurnel (Colonel) Hard was a snorin' away, I warn't perticllar, and I s'pose I kiss'd her too loud; for jist as I kissed her the last time, out hollered old Miss Bass: My Lord, Barb'ry! old Troup is in the milkpan; I heard him smackin' his lips a-lickin' of the milk. Git out, you old warmint-git out!'"

As a specimen of the extravagant in the same line, Colonel Crockett's admiration of a young lady, whose new gown was made of a whole bear's hide, the tail serving for a train, might be quoted. The said young lady could weave a rope of live rattlesnakes; and when giving her arm to Davy, put a fifty-pound stone into her pocket, to balance her on the other side. Davy, however, was outcourted here by a fellow with a pocket full of eyes, that had been gouged from people of his acquaintance!

Sketches like that of the "Decline and Fall of the City of Dogtown," are also very nationally characteristic, and have been introduced with success into our own literature. The "Way in which Billy Harris Drove the Drum-Fish to Market," is a bit of very original humour. So, also, of the father and son, both done at "thimble-rig;" and of twenty other stories, that might, many of them, be made the basis of good telling farces.

"Scenes and Adventures in Central America"* are said to be "based" upon the German works of Charles Sealsfield; but whencesoever derived, they are certainly admirably-depicted sketches of life and scenery. Mr. Hardman is a very clever writer-one of the best, in fact, of old Maga's contributors. The opening scene of a prairie on fire is as startling as anything of the kind in Cooper, and the horrors of the Cypress Swamp are accumulated till the reader feels his flesh creeping, and his very hair standing on end. The "Bloody Blockhouse" is a record of a gallant struggle on the part of a handful of American backwoodsmen against a host of Spaniards and French, or Acadians as they were called, when the latter held Louisiana. The main point in the Scamper in the Prairie," and which lies in the lost man following his own track for hours together, ever travelling in a circle, is now an oftrepeated transatlantic joke; we have it in another shape, in the instance of the 'coon-hunt, or a fency country, in Sam Slick's "Traits of American Humour." "Bob Rock" is a capital sketch of what a backwoodsman once was, and the "Patriarch Oak” is admirably described. "Twenty to One" is a little bit of Americanism, as patent as the capture and cutting-up of the sea-serpent, to any one versed in that rollicking, go-a-head kind of literature, of the true Davy Crockett style-which runs its career as interestingly disregardful of all propriety or possibility, as it is of all facts or truth.

*Scenes and Adventures in Central America. Edited by Frederick Hardman, Esq. William Blackwood and Sons.

THE CONSERVATIVE MINISTRY AND THEIR OPPONENTS. THE ascendancy of the manufacturing classes in this country is becoming daily more and more threatening to the common welfare. Already they are intolerant of labour, except at their own prices; nor will they suffer those to be in power who are not of them or with them. Taken as a body, these classes are guided in their politics by cheap Radical Sunday papers, and minor local publications of a still more subversive character, as also by stirring demagogues, of various power and influence for evil, from the club-orator to the great impediment at St. Stephen's. Taken as a body, their tendencies are in religion to Dissent, or more frequently to Mammon worship; in morality, to self-interest, glossed and coloured over by a transparent affectation of partisanship; in politics, to the perpetual tumbling down of old and reverend institutions, in order to supplant them by new, untried, inexperienced, often vulgar or little refined, and most inadequate substitutes. Above all, they are intolerant of all and everything that is not of themselves.

Herein, we hold, lies the great error of an industrious, enterprising, hard-working, skilful race of men, and of those who guide them in their social opinions-who help to form their likes and dislikes. We are very far from disparaging the manufacturing classes. We regard them with the respect due to one of the most wondrous phenomena of the age. Although we doubt if they have conduced, only in a very indirect manner, to increase the happiness of any one individual in the country, we are ready to grant that they have brought about unexampled prosperity. They have, with the aid of the commercial classes, and the mariners of Old England-the sturdy, sinewy race of bold adventurers, whose interests, so deeply interwoven with that of the manufacturing classes, have been yet sacrificed at the same shrine-raised this country to the highest pinnacle of riches and power. But this does not, by any means, constitute a right to be the sole rulers of this great nation. That they should have voices, loud in proportion to their importance, and as numerous and influential as their own host, none will deny; but that they should prevent any other party from holding power, except those who are prepared to go along with them and do their behests, is a state of things which, if not firmly and energetically combated in time, will soon leave all other interests prostrate, and at the mercy of one particular class. And are there not other interests in Great Britain besides the manufacturing? Without wishing to put one class against another, when, on the contrary, they are meant by nature to co-operate, are there not the agricultural classes? Are there not the colonial interests, which have been so grossly abused in the West Indies, in Kaffraria, and in almost every corner of the world, by the late incompetent ministry? Are there not the large class of rulers and their servants, customs, taxes, and all the other working departments of a national administration? Are there not the gallant defenders of the country-a body especially calumniated by the too often stunted and blighted artisan? Are there not, finally, all that concerns the education, the morality, the social well-being, the cultivation of taste, the intellectual progress, indeed, all the better and higher portions of our nature, religion, science, art, literature, philosophy, and law? Is wealth the sole source of national prosperity? Is there no such thing as religious April-VOL. XCIV. NO. CCCLXXVI.

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worth, moral strength and integrity, and, above all, individual contentment, based on that very worth, to insure the happiness of the greater number? No true patriot will deny this. None will feel but that the interests of a great country like this cannot be entrusted to the domination of one class, and that class, while we admit it to be the great source of wealth, is, we aver, at the same time, the least well-disposed towards those institutions, monarchical, legislative, and religious, which tend most to the moral and material welfare and well-being of society at large, than any other class in this country.

It was not a matter of surprise to find the Whigs, so long in power, and so long accustomed to truckle to and bow before the clamour of a manufacturing plutocracy, proclaim themselves the only possible party in this country between the two interests. The Conservatives not being prepared to go so far as to repeal free-trade, or to protect the agricultural interests by a tax on corn, are at once denounced by them to be incapable of governing this great country. As to the manufacturing classes, their plan of campaign was characteristic-it was to bid defiance to an imaginary danger, to denounce the aristocracy as a body, and to reconstitute a league against a crisis that could not well take place. Soon finding out their usual error of domineering haste and precipitancy, they then had the unmanliness to goad the Conservatives to the commission of error, to demand from them pledges to a policy of which they were no longer upholders; and when the same patriotic party went so far as to say that they were at least open to take and listen to the sense of the country upon these great questions, they were then denounced by almost the entire Radical party, as men who were only abiding their time, when they were, in fact, only abiding that of the country.

With the Whigs the course of proceeding was different. They taxed the Conservatives, not with being a party, but with intrusion! Not having in view the repeal of any great public measures, they were not wanted at all! "They were not asked," said Lord John Russell, "to take office on any other ground but because they had made a successful opposition to the government." They were not wanted. As to any measures that they (the Conservatives) propose to carry through, they (the Whigs) had intended to do just the same thing. Lord John Russell

did, however, in the irritation of defeat, acknowledge that he had not always found it in his power to carry, or precisely to mature perchance, even to think of all the good things that he had in store for an ungrateful people. "It is the duty," said Lord John, "of the prime minister of this country, to superintend the whole of the important questions that relate to foreign affairs, to the colonies, and to the domestic affairs of this country; and all questions with respect to the revenue, and other departments of the country that are of importance; but I felt it would be impossible for me, if I were to be liable to those continual attacks in this House, and if the government was to be degraded by those occasional defeats which must follow from the course adopted to take the House by surprise, I felt, I say, it would be impossible for me to give that due attention to subjects of great concern to the public, which it was my duty to give. I felt, therefore, if I were not driven out of office, I should be worried out of it by gentlemen in opposition."

A minister who thus acknowledged himself to have been worried out

of office by the opposition, would, it might be supposed, have been the last to adopt tactics which he qualifies as ungenerous and unconstitutional. Lord Derby appealed to the forbearance of his opponents, upon the broad constitutional ground that "he had that confidence in the good sense, judgment, and patriotism of the other House, which induced him to believe that it would not unnecessarily introduce subjects of a controversial and party character, for the mere purpose of interrupting the course of sound and useful legislation, and of driving the government out of that moderate and temperate course which it had prescribed to itself." Yet, what has the Whig opposition done but impel the Conservatives, with every instrument in their power-persuasion, satire, and even invective—to act against their own convictions? and finding that to fail, they coalesced with all the extreme parties, including the manufacturing interests, to turn a party out of office, which it is doubtful if they themselves would ever replace so rapidly, as we said at the onset, has been the progress of what was once an extreme, and what is still the most unpatriotic and the least constitutional party in this country.

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As Sir John Tyrell observed in the House of Commons, Lord John Russell had, by such a coalition, only acted the part of the dog in the manger; having found himself unable to administer the affairs of the government, he seemed determined to allow no other party to do so." And now that the ex-premier, finding he had fallen into a grave error in committing himself to a course of opposition which the country would not tolerate, that he had taken up a false position, and that neither the tone of society nor the public press would sanction such a factious opposition, he has, after breaking up the family-compact, withdrawn from his "broad-brimmed" allies,-what remains, but an opposition party founded at Chesham-place, of incongruous Whig and Radical interests, which must inevitably return, at the first serious discussion, to its original elements of family connexion and popularity-hunting metropolitism; of factory utopists, whom no one for a moment ever dreams that they can be really serious in their political views; and of a small but energetic little body of Irish members, representing the Roman Catholic interests; all separate and distinct factions, which never assume the dignified aspect of a party except in coalition, and can only, by such coalition, either impede or overthrow a Conservative government. Conservatism is, indeed, the first law of nature-it is the first principle of all men's actions; it should also be the basis of all national legislation. Even the Manchester utopists are Conservative; but it is in their own way, it is for a class, not for a country. Everything with them is to be made to work for the sole advantage of the manufacturing classes. For them, soldiers and sailors, farmers and professions, everything is to be sacrificed. This is not the kind of Conservatism represented by the existing ministry, and which is of the description best adapted to the real and most general interests of the United Kingdom.

It is, indeed, high time that the educated, the respectable, and the moral and intellectual classes should give in a more generous adhesion to a truly English and Conservative party. The errors of the cabal that proposed to strangle the new ministry at its birth; the signal failure of the Whigs in proving that no other government was possible than their own, have already been followed by the usual reaction, and the Conser