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order him to be assassinated immediately. The slave gave his master several hundred oxen, and directed some of his men to accompany him with them to a market, giving out among his herdsmen that he had thus paid a debt of old standing for which he had only now been called upon. A man who could act in this manner, well deserved the freedom which he had resolved to obtain.'

From St. Luiz, the port of the island of Maranham, where the blessings of despotism, slavery, and bigotry are enjoyed in a high degree, Mr. K. had a fancy to take a little trip to see his English friends, and landed at Falmouth, in May, 1811. In the last week of that same year he was again in the full gaieties of Pernambuco; where a period of less than twelve months had sufficed to produce a very visible alteration in the style of dress, and even in the manners of the people, in the exterior and interior appearance of the houses, in the sedan chairs, and in the equipment of the horses. The impulse of this change is represented as mainly given by a few families newly imported from Lisbon and England. It seems a pity that a people so easily rendered dissatisfied with themselves and their customs, should not have had the good fortune to obtain from abroad exemplars that would have prompted and attracted them to changes in much more important matters. How many diversities of the cut of their clothes, and the colour of their house fronts, and the shape of their furniture, and the regulations of their promenading, will they be manoeuvred through, at the caprice of the adventitious dictators of fashion, before any detachment of the European community will disturb them into innovation, by examples of judicious education, extensive and useful reading, genuine religion, and an adjustment of manners at once liberal and systematically moral?

Our Author amused himself with an excursion among the sugar plantations, with a particular attention to the economy of slave employment, and observant also of the characters and habits of the proprietors, and the free labourers. He was struck with the contrast between the almost solitary appearance of the country, on a general view, and the large assemblages of people drawn together at the churches at particular times, and at the planters' residences on occasions of sport and festivity. Frolic and riot are quite as necessary against the tedium of existence to the superior people, as to the meaner tribe; and on some of the days before Ash-Wednesday, Mr. K. and an accompanying friend were regaled quite to satiety, and something further, with a sport called intrudo. Before a meal is well ended, the partakers, the family, (that is, the men of it,) guests, and all, fall to pelting and bespattering one another with the eatables remaining on the table, commonly no small quantity. At one house, even the blackened pots and pans from

the kitchen were introduced,' for the purpose of a mutual besmearing of the gentlefolks' faces. Here, even the ladies were induced to join in the war, and the slaves were delighted to be admitted to a share. It is all taken in perfect good humour; or the utmost contempt assails any one that becomes angry and resentful.

Among the various plantations the Author visited, he distinguishes one, but without giving either local or personal name, as horribly infamous for cruelties perpetrated on the slaves, with a systematic, continued, wanton enormity.'

The estate was inherited by the person in question, with sixty good slaves upon it; fifteen years have elapsed since that time to the period of which I speak, and there were then remaining only four or five individuals who were able to work. Some have fled, and have escaped; others have died, God knows how; and others again have committed suicide in sight of their master's residence.'

Mr. K. says he did not hear any other of the planters charged with a conduct so systematic and atrocious:-might it not be expected then, that the miscreant in question would often have to encounter the most unequivocal and intentional signs of detestation from what is accounted the respectable part of the society of the country? No such thing:

'The conduct of the owner toward his slaves is often spoken of with abhorrence, but yet he is visited and treated with the same respect which is paid to an individual of unblemished character.'

So base a betrayer can politeness be to the cause of justice! Yet it perhaps never occurs to the thoughts of these civil gentry, that they will stand accountable, and will be joined in retribution, for so much of the wickedness as the honest manifestation of their opinion might have prevented. And our Author's delicacy, too, in so carefully suppressing the name,--was it in return for being regaled with pine-apples and oranges,' at the plantation? If so, we wish that, however hot the day might have been, he had declined swallowing so sweet a bribe to protect the entertainer's name from infamy by concealing it.

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This tour among the plantations, was preparatory to our Author's becoming, in connexion with a friend, a sugar-planter himself, by renting, in 1812, an estate called Jaguaribe, with the slaves, cattle, and other requisites upon it, four leagues from Recife, and one league from the coast. He relinquished it, however, towards the end of the following year, and became a resident and co-planter on the island of Itamaraca, where he remained till some time in the year 1815, when he abandoned, for reasons not assigned, the planter's vocation, to which he confesses he was become partial, and returned, perhaps finally, to Europe: perhaps finally, for he seems willing to contemplate

a possibility that he may be destined to accomplish what he earnestly and vainly wished while in South America, a journey of discovery quite across that Continent.

The proceedings and incidents in the course of these planting speculations, furnish a considerably lively and diversified narration, which is followed, toward the close of the volume, by a large assemblage of descriptions and observations of a more general kind. The natural appearance of the country, so different from the Sertum or desert, is largely displayed, with all its diversity of landscape, vegetation, and soil. The description of the whole economy of the plantations, is enlivened by a very great number of anecdotes and little personal adventures, for the most part illustrative of the state of the country, and the characters and habits of its heterogeneous population. The distinctive characteristics of each class and race, are marked; their moral effect on one another is rendered apparent; and the fantastic spectacle formed by the jumbling of so many sorts of human beings together, is brought out in a striking light.

The picture of a planter's life, is perhaps less repulsive in our Author's work, than in any former representation given on respectable authority; and it is so because he constrains us to believe, even though we should make some allowance for the circumstance of his being a native of Portugal, that the great majority of the Brazilian planters, have a much less oppressive and cruel system of management, than that which has loaded with so much infamy the slave-owners of the Dutch, Spanish, and English colonies. He deliberately and constantly declares that, in the tracts of Pernambuco, at least, the condition of the slaves is not generally severe, and that any savage infliction, or systematic intolerable oppression,. would render a planter infamous even among his class, notwithstanding the polite attention with which, as in the instance above quoted, he might be hypocritically treated among them.

Nevertheless, Mr. K. is a most decided enemy to the whole of the slave-system; and this, not because it would be disgraceful or unfashionable to be its advocate, but because, together with a conviction of its intrinsic iniquity, he perceived, in observation and experiment, the many practicable evils inseparable from its operation. These he has pointed out; and at the same time he has shewn the advantages attending the employment of freemen ;-advantages on the mere trade account, besides all the satisfactions of a moral kind. Happily, the various rules and modes of manumission, have rendered this class of negroes and mulattoes sufficiently numerous for an extensive diffusion of the practical evidence of the benefits of freedom.

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An extended account is given of the methods of cultivation, with the annoyances and disasters to which it is liable, and of the process of preparing the sugar. Mr. K. judges the Brazilian planters to be quite a century behind those of the West Indies, or, to use his phrase, the Columbian Islands,' in all the mechanical expedients for saving the labour of men and cattle. He anticipates that this incuriousness or dread of innovation cannot continue among them very long; but thus far, nothing can exceed the stupidity with which they have retained all the clumsy, tedious, toilsome, and unthrifty methods of their forefathers. A gross ignorance, indeed, on all subjects beyond the most contracted routine of accustomed practice, is quite general among the inferior order of planters. Some of the richest class are beginning to come in contact, in their visits or residence at Recife, with the knowledge of Europeans.

With respect to religion, if it may be so called, all classes seem nearly alike the slaves (or rather the dupes, for, as a burden, it is tolerably light upon their consciences) of the most ridiculous superstitions, of which a great number of curious illustrative instances are related.

The chief fault of this work is prolixity, occasioned by a uniform minuteness of detail. On some subjects great minuteness may be essential to the requisite precision; but in many of the matters of a book of travels, the writer should make an earnest effort to put himself in the reader's place, and subject his work to a severe process of selection and exclusion. The work is, nevertheless, of very considerable merit, for the information it brings, and for the principles of justice and humanity it serves to confirm.

The eight coloured plates, combining costume with scenery, are well executed, and contribute materially to the purpose of information.

Art. III. A Familiar and Practical Exposition of the Thirty nine Articles of Religion of the United Church of England and Ireland. By the Rev. H. C. O'Donnoghue, A. M. 12mo. pp. xlviii. 286. Price 7s. 6d. Taylor and Hessey. 1816.

THE Author of this Exposition professes to be a lover of

peace, and declares, that in reference to points which do not involve any of the essentials of Christianity, he has en-: deavoured so to express himself, as, to avoid giving offence. He informs us, that attached from conviction to the discipline as well as the doctrines of the Established Church, he has not. hesitated to avow unequivocally his feelings and sentiments, in

reference to the points at issue between Churchmen, and Dis senters; but that he has endeavoured to do it in a spirit of meekness and liberality. There cannot be any reasonable objection made to an unhesitating avowal of his feelings and sentiments; it is indeed nothing less than the exercise of a right to which every man has an indisputable claim. But we sincerely regret that strict justice compels us to declare, that Mr. O'D. completely fails to redeem his pledge of a candid and inoffensive manner of writing. This "Exposition" contains allegations of a most uncharitable kind, and insinuations which are in direct opposition to the clearest and most decisive evidence.

The perusal of this Exposition, will tend to convince every impartial reader, that if moderate Churchmen' have of late professed to shew a disposition to lay aside their animosities, to avoid all unessential disputes, and to regard Dissenters in the true spirit of Christian philanthropy, it is by profession chiefly that such a disposition has been manifested. It presents only an additional illustration of the falsity of the assertion so confidently made, that the Dissenters are not attacked, or even alluded to, in any unfriendly way, by Evangelical Churchmen. Mr. O'D. is, we doubt not, as moderate and as well disposed as are most of his brethren; but to construe some parts of his book as not unfriendly, in the spirit which has dictated them, towards Dissenters, is, we confess, no easy task, how much soever we might be disposed to find in them the evidence of Christian candour.

The larger proportion of the Dissenting Societies in England, are of the Congregational or Independent denomination; which, as to the mode of church government, includes Baptists and Pædobaptists. Of this mode, Mr. O'D. speaks in the following

terms.

Scarcely had the nation escaped from the tyranny of Popery, before the evil spirit of dissent manifested itself. Some inferior ministers began to disturb the Church's peace by their efforts to abolish all ecclesiastical distinctions and subscription to the book of Articles. They were for bringing in the independent scheme; a plan well suited to gratify the pride of those who, boasting themselves to be something, were nothing.* pp. xxxiii, iv.

Episcopacy, then, is doubtless a plan well suited to promote humility. Cathedrals, and palaces, and mitres, and prebends, and deaneries, are wonderfully well calculated to gratify a lowly and heavenly mind: they are well adapted to crucify the flesh, with its affections! pride and ambition attach themselves only to the Independent scheme!

*We are responsible for the emphatic Italics of this and some other passages.Red.

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