describe the fatigue I am forced to suffer for want of such a guard. I entreat your Excellency to depute somebody to dispose of my cargoe to the best advantage; and that you will be so good as to keep my share for me 'till my return, and, likewise, that you will accept your own £150 out of it; for I have already near £40 in gold and silver for A what I have sold of your Excellency's goods, and I doubt not the remainder will nearly make up your money.

what exceeds my share is sent down in goods for the best now, it will make me able to manage the rest; for without rewards and punishments nothing is to be done. I have explained to them the difference between Mirander's price and the price of Jamaica. So when these people's shares that are most to be depended on arrive, I expect it will open the eyes of the rest. periaugua that was with Forbes brings me word that there is a packet for me at Pitts & Atkins, to which place I will hasten. But Generall Hobby has sent me word that his people have taken an Estaictea near a large town, which he will not attempt till I come back and make him understand your Excellency's pleasure better.

I presume, as this cargo is sent up by King Edward for himself, me, and the best of the Muskito men, that it will not require the formality or expense of a legal condemnation. Experiments cannot be made at a smaller expence than I make them.

I beg you will send me an account, if possible, of the very spot where the revolt happened in 1733. I am in great want of hand mapps. The chief Muskito men's minds are thoroughly afloat in expectation

haps my life is at stake.

I must not forget the governor's good behavior in Carpenter's River, who at my request released above 100 Indian prisoners and negroes, whom I made to play upon their strum-strums, whilst their masters worked at filling the serons. There was of your Excellency's favor of good return only a mulatto shot dead, three wounded, from Jamaica, so that my credit, and perand one broke his neck in running away. I am not yet able to prevail with the Muskito mulattos to free the Coccelee Indians, though the better half of them are run away. I am greatly afraid that your Excellency will think that I have had an eye to my own interest more than to the common cause in this expedition, (which I assure you I have not,) for in the first place I was obliged to leave the choice to the Muskito men; and in the second I imagine that a trial of the Muskito men, whether they have any sentiments of liberty at a distance from the place where I provided they shall make a full declaration for that of their brother Indians, would be the securest proof of them.

I have been often in more danger from them than from the Spaniards. I entreat your Excellency once more to excuse my paper, and to send me down a great deal of ball and some powder. I am just taken with the country feaver, so that I hope my loose manner of writing will be excused too. I have thrice lost my limbs for an hour or so, but the use of them returned again. There is no manner of harm in this climate if people will but refrain from spirituous liquors. And I can without the least ostentation challenge all privateers that have preceded me to show equal fatigues. Should I prove a vox et preterea nihil, of which I am constantly suspicious, it will at least give the hint to more able enterprising genius's.

My humble service to your lady, and I am your Excellency's most sincerely devoted and obedient humble servant,

ROBERT HODGSON.

I don't know how Hobby's guard may prove, but am sure the Indians are much preferable to the mulattoes that have been with me. They say themselves that the trade at Carpenter's River has spoil'd them. I beg your Excellency to send me down at least 20 blank commissions, 2 carpenters, 1 taylor, 1 gun-smith, and that you will be so good as to give my corporal his discharge. He will be necessary to me in future expeditions, which I hope will redown more to my reputation than this. For here has been no opposition. But Dolu and Yucatan will surely afford some sport. Could I but have will be utterly impossible; for, unfortunately, 30 select men out of the companies, it would the national councils always embrace more or be a fine help to me; for it is impossible to ❘ less gentlemen who regard it praiseworthy to

It is to be feared that false views of economy will operate to prevent the United States Government from becoming possessed of the historical treasure from which these documents are taken, until its obtainment oppose every expenditure of the public funds not designed to meet current absolutely necessary expenses on the most economical scale. No argument to prove this a pennywise and pound-foolish policy is necessary in these enlightened times. It is due to the country at large, that the invaluable histori- |

and papers. In the possession of the General Government alone will there be positive surety for all time that they will be open for the investigation and profit of all. We presume that it would be impossible for Col. F. to ascertain what it has cost in money; for while many of its most valua

cal collection above referred to should be ble treasures were free gifts from persons in preserved for general reference; that it all sections of the Union desirous of adding should be open, under proper regulations, to to its completeness, we learn that he has at all who may have occasion to pursue inves- times been forced to pay as high as huntigations in this very important but decid- dreds of dollars for a single volume in edly most neglected branch of our literature-American History. The absorption of well nigh our entire population in active business pursuits of life, sufficiently explains why, as a general thing, we rely so much on Europe for our literature, though it fails to touch this point of our remakarble deficiency in the matter of knowledge of the history of ourselves and our country. The general want of proper sources of information (well arranged and complete historical libraries) furnishes the key. True, each State is now forming its own historical library, but, with inconsiderable exceptions, these are confined to the collection of data for the elucidation of its own past times. This library of Col. Force is all we have national, or rather continental, in its character, and it will be a burning shame, as well as a serious drawback on our national advancement, if it be not secured for our whole | country. THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, We understand, is desirous of becoming its possessor. Though entertaining great respect for that institution, and desiring for it, ardently, a career of distinction, prosperity and public utility, we should regret to see it become the owner of these invaluable books

manuscript of importance. Thus, he possesses a proof-sheet of engraved heads of Americans of distinction flourishing about the beginning of the present century, the work of an eminent and accurate French artist on private account. This embraces small portraits of hundreds of gentlemen residing then in all sections of the Union. It is probably the only impresssion of the whole in existence. For this he paid one hundred and fifty dollars; and he has since lost no opportunity to have the likenesses identified, no key being left by the artist. He has succeeded so far in the identification of perhaps half the heads, which are in medallions of the size of a silver dollar. The consignment of manuscript volumes, from which the papers forming the subject of this article were taken, are twenty in number, embracing rare, unpublished writings on the West Indies, Mexico, Louisiana and Florida, and the private papers of Admirals Wager and Vernon, as before mentioned. We learn that this single consignment cost him more than fourteen hundred dollars. These facts are mentioned only to show the impossibility of estimating the actual cost of such a collection.

THE MORAL AND THE ARTISTIC IN PROSE FICTION.

THE popular novel of modern times is perhaps too well known to need a definition. Still it may be proper, in reference to the acquisition of just standards, to throw out some general considerations in regard to this peculiar structure in art. The history of the novel is a very simple one. In general respects it is that of the drama; one of the happy modes by which ingenuity contrives to beguile ignorance to knowledge. Its beginnings are to be found amongst the first dawnings of the human intellect. The child himself is a raconteur. He begins the exercise of his thought by tasking his constructive faculty for its assistance, in the ambitious desire to provoke the wonder and admiration of his young and less endowed companions. He invents facts and situations, and accumulates events in proper order and becoming relation, so as to form a history. And in this exercise he becomes an artist. The continuance of the practice results in a greater or smaller degree of perfection, more or less modified by the sur rounding influences of society and proper models.

Hamlet, it comes "easy as lying." Were older heads to give their attention to the boy narratives that spell the ears of the happy groups that linger by the schoolhouse porch, or in the play-grounds, or on a Saturday out among the woods, they would be surprised to discover, amidst so much of the frivolous and puerile, so much that betrayed thought and talent in invention, -the invention or the capacity for structure invariably preceding the moral in the mind of the boy, and even the thought by which what is simply moral in the story is educed or indicated; the boldness of the fancy and the readiness of resource in the raconteur, still showing themselves superior to the general crudeness of the conception, and the feeble and common-place character of the materials. We are made to see the scheme in spite of the agency; made to observe a fitness of parts and a symmetrical design, leading through a thousand awkwardnesses and obscurities to a really judicious moral. Of course the moral as such forms no part of the object of the juvenile narrator, or his more juvenile audience. The common aim is the story-the simple accumulation of interesting incidents in relation to some hero for whom all sympathies are enlisted. But as truthfulness is never wanting in its moral, and as the great end of every artist is the approximation of all his fiction to a seeming truth, so unavoidably he inculcates a moral, of more or less value, whenever he tells a story. As the peculiar endowment which makes the raconteur is equally native and decided, so the passion for his narratives, even among those who do not share his faculties, is equally true to the moral instincts of his auditory. All listen with eagerness, and yield ready credence to all statements which keep within the verge of possibility; and with the eager and believing mind of youth, the limits of the posunnecessary barriers to the ardent spirit and the free imagination.

Even in childhood, however, the faculty is an extraordinary one. It betrays talents which are by no means shared by many. Not one child in the hundred possesses the endowment, or certainly to no great extent. They may possess large faculties of thought and of expression. They may give forth elaborate sentiments and show proofs of ingenious speculation, accompanied by eloquent utterance. They may be poets even, without possessing the faculty of weaving together, in intricate relation and with due dependency, such scenes and events in life, indicated by the interposition of moral agents, as distinguish the labors of the composer in prose fiction. For this they strive vainly; and many strive, who, highly endowed in seemingly kindred departments of art, yet fail utterly to take the first step in the con-sible are wonderfully flexile, and oppose no

structing of prose fiction.

Not so with him who is "to the manner born." To him, employing the language of

VOL. VIII. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

It is this ready faith in the auditory which

8

real, into the rare atmosphere of an ideal which suffered from no incumbrances.

Gradually, as art continued to advance

As

determines the legitimacy of the art-which has been practised from the beginning of time, in all the nations and all the ages of the earth. No people have ever lived within the refinement of her own powers, and out their authors of fictitious narrative. No in the more facile employment of her own people can live without them, since the machinery, fiction became a thing of more faculties which find their utterance through complexity of form and of diminished imathis medium are the very faculties-the gination in respect to its conceptions. creative, the combining, and the endow the faith of the ignorant in the objects of ing-by which men are distinguished from former superstition became lessened and inall other animals. The art has shown itself flexible, the raconteur found it necessary to quite as decidedly among the savages of accommodate his fiction to the more rigid North America, as among the most highly and exacting standards of the popular belief. refined of the Asiatic nations. The inven- To seem like truth was still, as it had tions of our Six Nations, of the Cherokees, always been in all ages, the object of the Choctaws, and Catawbas, if inferiorin polish judicious artist; and the invention which . and variety, do not seem to have been less had hitherto been exercised with the vague daring and original than those of the Ara- and supernatural, suffered no real or great bians, to whom we are indebted for some of diminution of its resources, when it felt itself the most admirable of those legends which compelled to turn its eye without rather than seem particularly designed to do their of within for its materials; when the deeds of fices of tuition with a young and primitive man, rather than his secret soul and specupeople. These fictions, constituting some of lative performances, afforded the substance the very loveliest conceptions which art has of the chronicle; and the collective heart of over drawn from the fountains of the imagi- the multitude, in its open exhibitions, served nation, were at first simple, and like those for the field of analysis, in place of the sinof childhood. The additions of succeeding gle individual, being, doing, or suffering, generations, the more elaborate efforts of which hitherto had been the almost exclusuperior artists, have improved them for the sive study. Histories of men - periods delight of races more matured. At first which betrayed large groups in active issues, these performances were scenes and sketches such as the middle ages-naturally took the rather than histories, and were employed place of more primitive material. The roupon such events of the common experience mance of progress was the legitimate sucas were at once most natural and impressive. eessor of that which illustrated the purely But when religion began to act upon the spiritual nature-which, by the way, was a imagination, the artist soon became tasked romance of progress also, though in a sense for higher exercises, and glimpses of the very different from any other; and this, in wild and spiritual were made to elevate the turn, was followed just as naturally by the common-place and ordinary. This led to romance of society, or the ordinary novel of the machinery of superstition. Hence magic, the present day. as an agency by which romance was first begotten; hence diablerie, by which the soul was made to startle at contact with a spiritual world, even when the doctrine of a future itself was left totally untaught, except as a purely speculative philosophy. In the phantoms of the imagination, the spectres of ignorant dread, and those vague and shadowy aspects that lurked in lonely places, among the woods, in the hollows of desolate hills, in the depths of lovely but forbidden waters, the various orders and denominations of Gnome, Kobold, Ondine, Sylph and Fairy, we behold the fantastci creations of a genius struggling constantly to pass from the oppressive chambers of the

In each of the latter classes of fiction, the chief object seems to have been so to delineate the aspects of real life, under certain conditions of society, as at once to preserve all their distinctive characteristics, and to invest with a biographical interest certain favorite studies of character and situation. These objects render necessary an admirable co-operation of the artist with the philosopher; the painter of detail with the poet of fine conceptions. It must be evident, even to persons of the most ordinary reflection and understanding, that to execute such a design with only moderate success, demands a very rare combination of moral attributes. Scarcely any intellectual performance, in

deed, could task a greater variety of human has raised? He must be a person of great powers. Keen perception, quick instincts, vigilance and freshness of resource, else how delicate tastes, strong good sense, a perfect should he vary his entertainments for his knowledge of character, a nice appreciation guests according to their differing characterof all that constitutes the sensibilities, and istics and desires? The flexibility of his all that makes the virtues of the social man; intellectual vision must be great, else how -these are all absolute requisites for that should he be capable of that instinctive apartist, who, in the delineation of real life, in preciation of character which is called for by an atmosphere of fiction, must, to a certain the constant necessity of discriminating his extent, borrow faculties from every other dramatis persona, the great essential requidepartment of human art. The poet must site for success in portraiture and for drayield him fancy and imagination; the matic vitality in action? The first dawning painter, an eye to the landscape; the sculp- of the humors of a period,―using the word tor, a just conception of form and attitude; in the sense of Ben Jonson,-its passing the dramatist, combination and the art of moods and fashions, its singular traits of trouping—and even the lawyer and the moral and society, (which are mostly epigistorian must, or may be drawn upon,- demical, and flit with the progress of a the one for the capacity to argue out a case season,) are among the minor but scarcely from certain premises and facts to a just less necessary requisitions of his art; to conclusion, to weigh the motives to action, execute which requires a rare versatility of and determine the awards of judgment; talent. To this versatility no mere sumand the other, to sift the causes of social mary, like the present, could possibly do progress, to estimate duly the morals of justice. Let it suffice that the great or leading events, the effects which they should successful worker in prose fiction must be, produce, and the principles to which, taking Walter Scott for our most obvious whether for good or evil, they are likely to example, a person of equal imagination and give birth hereafter, affecting equally the cool common sense; of lively but healthy condition of the community and the aspira- sensibilities; of great tact, (which is another tions of the individual man. In a rare word for admirable taste,) and of equal vigijudgment all these faculties are necessarily lance and courage. He must be able to found to unite. The artist in prose fiction, observe without effort,-so endowed by namore than any other, must possess in ture and so trained by practice as to achieve, large degree the constructive faculty. Poe- so to speak, by the simple outpouring of try depends chiefly upon its courage and his customary thoughts. His habitual mensentiment; the drama upon its passion; tal exercise must be the acquisition of matemusic upon its spirituality; and painting rial, and its partial subjection to his purposes, upon its happy distribution of light and though in detached and fragmentary condishade, the harmony of its colors, and the ditions, susceptible of adaptation to more symmetry of its forms. But, borrowing in elaborate uses when his schemes ripen into some degree all these agencies, the artist in design. Carrying the materials which he prose fiction makes them all ancillary to thus habitually realizes, without effort and one particularly his own, and that we con- almost without consciousness, to the alembic sider the constructive faculty. With this of his thought, he will extract from them faculty it is that he frames and adapts his by a process which, in the trained author, materials to whatever sort of edifice it is the goes on without respite, all the sublimated particular aim of his genius to erect. That essences which, thus resolved, become aggreedifice may be a palace or a hovel, but it is gated within himself and constitute the required to be symmetrical, in compliance means and expedients of his own genius. with laws growing out of the very concep- He is original and inventive in due degree tion which suggests the structure. The as he has incorporated these external elebuilder, to achieve the reputation of a mas-ments in with his own thoughts, and the ter, must conceive boldly the plan and pur-habitual workings of his own intellect. pose of his fabric; and this requires a To acquire such materials, and to attain vigorous imagination. He must possess a these results, no mere fagging with a lively fancy, else how should he adorn fitly can possibly avail. No mere drudgery under and properly embellish the fabric which he the stimulating force of will can possibly

purpose