ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES.*

As infinite deal of nonsense has issued from the press of both countries on the animosities and sorenesses said to exist between the United States of America and Old England. If the temper and judgment of mother and daughter are to be estimated by the character of their printed correspondence, there will be but scanty room for complimenting either. The attack and retort come and go as regularly as the interchange of the packets. The sarcasms of the Quarterly Review, which dispenses consolation to afflicted legitimacy, are repaid with interest by its American namesake, conducted by Dr. Walsh. Captain Hall brandishes a book of travels; Mr. Cooper a body of "Notions," and in each the materials of discord are pleasantly abundant. The sailor and the novelist have acquitted themselves like dutiful children, amicably disposed for a family feud. If the feelings of Britain and the States were indeed represented by persons so sterile in philosophy, their pious endeavours could hardly fail to keep the torch of strife continually burning.

Thanks to the clear heads and sound hearts which constitute the strength and wealth and honour of these great kindred empires, partiality and prejudice are not our representatives. Tourists and reviewers may play off "the paper pellets of the brain," but the natural confederacy of intelligence and independence emanates from principles too firm and elevated to be shaken by this paltry warfare. A petulant speech in Congress, or the wormwood of a party periodical, disturbs not British confidence in American goodwill, and sure we are, that in the indulgence of a sober, considerate, and charitable spirit, we do not stand alone.

We speak of the people—the substantial citizenship—the real communitythe bone, sinew, and pure blood of the bedy politic. There are those " among us, but not of us," who, under cover of their name, would gladly scatter the seeds of dissension in the lands most endeared to our sympathies. Court-flies, and the minions of a grasping aristocracy, abhor the fellowship of freemen. It leads to knowledge-to popular power to the annihilation of corruption. There are tangible grounds therefore for that malignity towards America which has envenomed the quills of those who rarely write in a creditable cause, until it has been consecrated by the approving nod of authority.

It is a gross libel on our countrymen to charge them with hoarding vindictive remembrances towards the States, or with entertaining the desire of aggrandizement at their expense. Many were far from hostile to the celebrated Declaration of Independence; they considered it the fitting alternative of injured men. The recollection of New Orleans distracts not our slumbers; if we ever think of the days of battle, it is with sorrow that such days should have occurred. As to territorial aggression, we should be more likely to meditate the transference of the Canadas to our neighbours, than to plan the occupation of New Hampshire. The cormorants of war and intrigue may thirst after contention; our prayer is for peace, and for the fruits of peace-a liberal exchange of the blessings of the earth and the products of mental and manual ingenuity.

The language of aversion or contempt enters with an ill grace into the communications of States associated by such numerous and such intimate ties as England and America. The intemperance of literary disputants shall never induce us

Boston:

Authorship, a Tale. By a New-Englander Over-Sea. 8vo. pp. 267. U.S. 1830.-Rachel Dyer, a North American Story. By John Neal. 8vo. pp. 276. Portland. 1828.

to countenance or adopt it. There exists no reason why the subjects of an ancient limited Monarchy should of necessity affect to undervalue the merits of a young Republic. The opinions of a Philadelphia Journal completely accord with ours:-"There needs nothing but mutual distrust to produce a war between any two contiguous nations-and there can be no differences too great to be adjusted by mutual good will. We regard the policy which cherishes defiance and hatred between nations as murderous and diabolical, and consider the manifestation of such sentiments, a complete disqualification for any office that would bring them into action." When our Transatlantic friends are disposed in future to notice their flippant assailants, let them bear in mind that the controversy is not to be maintained against Englishmen, but against an interested and intolerant faction of whom Englishmen are weary.

The tale of colonial wrong is inscribed upon the oppressor's tomb. There it should be permitted to rest as a permanent record of shame. It is neither wise nor equitable to ransack the records of civil strife, merely to upbraid a generation guiltless of its origin, and ignorant of its heart-burnings. They misinterpret us grievously, who presume that we are capable of being chafed by the triumphs of Liberty, or that we could stoop to cherish a mean jealousy of the growing prosperity of her adherents.

We love the land of our nativity, but we should cease to love it, if our attachment were incompatible with a generous regard for the common interests of mankind. Our understandings are untrammelled by the evil policy of princes and their advisers, although institutions warped from their original purpose, may have placed public officers beyond public control, and given to the few the power of misrepresenting the many. The resources of Great Britain are unparalleled crippled as she has been by misgovernment, she still reigns without an equal. The dreadful scourge of war came to her in the seductive guise of victory and conquest. She extended her boundaries, and opened new avenues to wealth. But her proudest and least perishable monument raises its head above the waves of the West; where the industry, intelligence, and hardihood of her descendants, have given them a political and moral rank, equal to that of the parent country, compared with the kingdoms of Europe. In numbers, those who speak the English tongue considerably exceed the Spaniards; in all that ennobles humanity, they are immeasurably superior to them, and to every other race on the Continent of Columbus. ́ In about half a century, amidst the fluctuations of a sanguinary and protracted war which raged over the whole earth, a newly-organized confederacy of thinlypeopled provinces became consolidated into a mighty empire, respected abroad, and peaceful and flourishing in its internal relations. If the future may be augured from the past, we are warranted in the prediction, that a second series of the history of British grandeur will be supplied by North America.

Many and magnificent are the problems in progress to solution among the sons of the Union. A thousand opposite elements have been mingled and melted in the crucible of a Republican constitution, to produce the pure gold of order and equal rights. No similar experiment was ever so successful. There has been a conspiracy among our task-masters, to keep us in ignorance of its happy results. They would have us raise the hand of violence against our brother, that they and theirs may walk in "purple and fine linen." Mammon has a host of worshippers here, and the slang of an oligarchy prompts them to contemn institutions which lack "the pomp and circumstance" of courtly parade. The delusion, however, in common with a troop of like delusions, is passing away. To annihilate it entirely, requires only the aid of an honest and enlightened mind, competent to pronounce upon the singular position of America; a mind that shall lay before us exactly what she is, whom all acknowledge to be for her age a prodigy; a mind that will not amble its ingenuity in devising inapplicable comparisons, nor nauseate both the Old World and the New with the camomile of sneaking commendation, like a sagacious

Captain, who thinks our pulses require a heavy dose, to keep them below the fever-throb of Revolution.

American writers, deficient neither in observation nor experience, have assured their countrymen that the English people regard them with irreconcileable dislike. In doing so, they may not be aware that they completely subserve the end for which the mercenaries employed by the spoilers of that very people pursue their obliquitous vocation. They have mistaken the babble of a pitiful coterie for the voice of a high-minded community—the squeak of a rat for the roar of the Lion. We fancy that a cause may be assigned for this absence of discrimination. Some small creature, shrouding his insignificance under the wings of a review, once insolently inquired-" Who reads an American book?" The chatter of the popinjay was instantly mimicked by all the pilferers of opinion, and the idiotism was echoed and re-echoed in the bye-ways of imbecility, until an answering swell of indignation pealed across the Atlantic, charging us with an utter disruption of the bonds of consanguinity, with an inherent incapacity for concord. "I have but one request to make," says the author of the works, the titles of which fringe the front of this article.-Let these words be inscribed upon my tombstone-" Who reads an American book?"

John Neal, a man of robust intellect, sinned against his dignity, in transferring this pert query to his wholesome, masculine pages. If John yearn to inspeet his own epitaph, we shall favour him with one, that some hundred years hence will cause his pale parted spirit to smile like moonlight on tremulous waters. But wishing to eschew poesy, melancholy, the green turf, and funereal cypress, we for the present pass the tombstone uninscribed. Every lover of letters admires the fruits of American genius; but with these, books published by Americans have been less frequently identified than their friends could wish. The intellectual adventurers of the States have too often preferred an humble coasting adventure in St. George's Channel, to a bold cruize on the majestic ocean, that pays dignified obeisance to their native shores. Far be it from us, notwithstanding, to reproach them with pusillanimity. We know what they have to contend with. Here they are threatened with the puissant bodkins of petty critics; at home they stand in the suspicious light of contrabandists. On 'Change they are unknown; they add not the mite of their eloquence to the redundant oratory of contested elections, and they recede not into the bosom of the wilderness, to rifle the virgin treasures of the soil, or to bow the heads of the forest giants, who, like all aboriginals, are quickly exterminated by the intruding hand of merciless civilization. There is a time for every thing, a time for felling timber, for building arsenals, ships and cities, for opening canals, for constructing rail-roads, for erecting stately edifices, for imparting to canvass the measure of glorified endurance of which colours and canvass are susceptible, for investing sculptured forms with that transcendant grace which makes the most symmetrical of Adam's offspring turn abashed from the mirror of the summer pool, for compiling classical history, for fabricating wondrous romance, and for roaming over "Meads of Asphodel" with William of Avon, and divers others of the masters whose tints have triumphed over time. There is an epoch for each of these achievements, and if England's red-capped daughter were endowed with the speed of Atalanta, she could not be expected in the blossom of her girlhood to have bounded through half the series. Certes she has not lagged on the course, and she bids fair to challenge at the goal the best honours of the Olympic. In the meantime, let those of her children who are staking their hearts' hopes on the chances of literary celebrity, make allowance for the sturdy habits of an untamed Amazon, and " have patience and shuffle the cards."

"Who reads an American book?" Not we-half so often as we desire, We cannot cheat ourselves with the Sketch-book or Columbus, the Pilot or the Red Rover, for unhappily we have ascertained that Geoffrey Crayon was eradled in an ivy-mantled cot at the skirt of a village kirk, in the county of

Devon, and that the Travelling Bachelor first drew his nautical breath in the little ex-sovereignty of Man. We long for the undoubted offspring of the republican soul, and have them we shall as they spring into existence, not solely for selfish gratification, but also and more especially to minister delight to our gentle and well beloved and multitudinous supporters, for whom we have decreed that a brace of hemispheres shall be placed under contribution. Maugre the ultra-sensibility of the tombstone affair, we vouchsafe John Neal, author of Authorship, a cordial grasp of our good right-hand, and beg to introduce him to our readers as a gentleman worthy of taking a place in the roll of their select. He exults in the name of Yankee, and Yankees should be proud of him. He has written American books, and therefore have we singled out his latest publication for the text of this discourse. Neal, as a novelist, is not a juvenile campaigner. We remember in the list of his productions, Logan, Seventy-six, Randolph, KeepCool, and Brother Jonathan. These novels severally and collectively, are of very unequal merit. The least felicitous have merit; the unequivocal impress of a concentrated and opulent mind. Seventy-six was our favourite; it presents a stirring picture of the Colonial struggle in the memorable period of the "Declaration."

"Rachel Dyer, a North-American Story," appeared in 1828. The copy lying upon our table, is the only one we have seen in this country. The effect produced by its perusal, may be surmised from the fact that we cannot revert to its pages for a passing purpose without pain. It is a tale of those dark and terrible times in New England, when accusations of witchcraft were gravely heard in the halls of justice, and promptly acted upon even to the death. The object of the author was twofold; in the first place, to shew that moral beauty may flourish under physical deformity; and in the second, to exemplify how austere and well-meaning men have, under factitious influences, violated the ordinances of God and the ties of Nature, and yet believed themselves to be the faithful administrators of divine and human law. The former purpose is less effectively accomplished than the latter. Rachel Dyer, though a noble creature, is too seldom in the front-ground to wed us to her destiny. Burroughs, the wild preacher of the woods, is a personage worthy of the dramatic era of Elizabeth. The uncompromising intercessor for the victims of superstition, he at length shares with Rachel the dismal doom they have laboured to avert from others. A brief extract from the volume will serve to illustrate the appalling fidelity of its execution. Burroughs having pleaded in vain for an aged woman, whose mental imbecility is her only crime, hurries away from the miserable consummation of judicial madness.

No language on earth, no power on earth can describe the scene that followed his departure, the confusion, the outcry, the terror of the people who saw the fire fly from his rocky path, and heard leap after leap of the charger bounding toward the precipice; nor the fright of the judges; nor the pitiable distress and perplexity of the poor childish woman, when she was made fully to understand, after the tumult was over, and the dread clamour and fire-flashing had passed away, and every thing was quiet as the grave-nothing to be heard but a heavy trample afar off, and the dull roar of the sea— that she must be prepared for death.

She could not believe it-she would not believe it-she did not--such was her perfect simplicity, till the chief judge came to her and assured her with tears in his eyes, over and over again, that it must be so.

Ah me! said poor Martha, looking out toward the quarter of the sky where the horseman had so hastily disappeared, and where she had seen the last of the fire-light struck from his path; ah me! bending her head to listen, and holding up her finger as if she could hear him on his way back. Ah me!-ah me!-and that was all she said in reply to her judges, and all she said when they drove her up to the place of her death, decked out in all her tattered finery, as if it were not so much for the grave, as for a bridal that she was prepared.

Ah me! said poor Martha, when they put the rope about her neck. Ah me!and she died while she was playing with her little withered fingers, and blowing the loose grey hair from about her mouth as it strayed away from her tawdry cap-say

ing over the words of a child in the voice of a child, Ah me--ah me- with her last breath.

'God forgive her judges!'

"Authorship" is strongly marked by the peculiar characteristics of Neal's genius. There is nothing in the plot, and little in the characters, to fix the attention, which is nevertheless rivetted as by a spell. The scene is laid in Old England, and the writer tells the tale in his own person, with such a solemn particularity of detail, such a mingling of the real and the imaginative, as to create a doubt whether he be not actually relating a passage of his life. The preliminary pages of the narrative, will give-what we cannot-an idea of his methodical rambling, his connected unconnectedness, and the vigour and originality of his thoughts.

'I must be allowed to tell my story in my own way; and though I speak in the first person, I hope to have it attributed to the true cause a desire to be understood.

I left America and went to England, not to see Westminster-Abbey, nor any other "part of the British Constitution," whatever the Quarterly Review may suppose, but in the hope of seeing much there, that I hope never to see in America, much that I do hope to see here, and much that I should have looked upon, wherever I might see it, with more joy and a deeper emotion, I dare say, than I ever yet felt or ever shall feel at the sight of abbeys and cathedrals, churches and castles, green with age though they be, rocking to the northern blast, or very dark with the shadows of centuries. Not that I did not go up to Westminster-Abbey-the sepulchre of kings-with a sort of awe, which, republican though I was, I could not well get the better of: nor do I mean to say that I ever was, or that I ever hope to be, so reasonable as to find just what your over-reasonable creature would look for-and no more-in the ruins of such a place, the wreck of what in the day of its power was only the strong-hold of superstition, or a part of the huge outworks of tyranny. But if I had perceived the truth; if I had gone back to that age, when the very foundations of military and religious power were laid in Europe, where would have been the evil, where the mischief I pray you, of that awe which I suffered to creep over me like the penumbra of a great eclipse happening at noon-day in the depth of summer? Why may not the strong holds of superstition or the outworks of tyranny (if dilapidated) be worth a voyage over sea, to the poet or the dreamer, to the artist or the philosopher, to the man or the statesman? People may say what they please; but though I was not boy enough to go a thousand leagues, nor boy enough to talk as if I thought it worth while for another to go so far, merely to get a peep at Westminster Abbey-to say nothing of Magna-Charta and the House of Lords-still, when I had arrived there, I could not overlook what I saw before me, nor outrage the Spirit of the place by considering what must have been the substance of that power, the very type and shadow of which, six hundred years after the glory had departed from it, was awful to the heart, and oppressive to the mind of man. Nor was I fool enough either to put off my shoes, or to say that I felt as if I should put them off, or as if it were sacrilege to walk otherwise than barefooted, when I drew near the arched door-way--the holy spot, where you pay sixpence to a man with a stick, for leave to run by the poet's corner-a marble congress of " gods and godlike men," whose mighty ashes, after all, are not in WestminsterAbbey, but somewhere in the depths of the sea, or in the far parts of the earth. But still, though I was not blockhead enough either to behave or to talk as it would appear to be the fashion of the people who have strayed away from the woods and waters of America to behave and talk, when they have got fairly ashore in the heart of Westminster-Abbey-especially if they were landed at the Custom-house, or shipped to the care of S. W. or B. B. & Co.-I could not laugh at every thing I saw, though much of it was very laughable; nor could I philosophize over the origin of what was before me, and about me, and above me, till I forgot where I was, and had no pleasure in what I saw; nor behold without emotion the barbarous beauty that overshadowed me -so superior to the classical beauty that other men love to talk about, or the savage pomp that uprose on every side of me, as with a spring, and over-arched my way, and shut in my view whithersoever I went, like ano, not like a spider-net sky of solid stone, nor a carved or fretted sky, nor a firmament of tracery, but very much like a roof built of oak timber, wrought with the chisel and hewed with the axe of mortal

man.