mits of the mountains have cut away a visible and uniform path, sweeping trees and every obstacle before it, until the spoils are accumulated at the foot of the mountains. In fact every foot of this route of a hundred miles is, as far as my acquaintance with scenery extends, of unexampled sublimity. Nor can I imagine any thing nearer to the romance and marvellous of the Arabian Nights, than the white canal boat, with its gay lading of fashionables, fresh and nice from the bandbox, drawn along the sleeping waters of a canal scooped out between such mountains, wild, solitary, vast, and whose rock encumbered sides show, as if nature threatened ruin to every thing with life, that should venture among her own retirements. I can imagine no higher treat for the tourist and the lover of nature, than the first canal boat trip from the Juniatta crossing of the Susquehannah to Pittsburgh. While my companion and myself were contemplating the central and most striking passages of this route, as our stage wound slowly up and down the sides of the mountains, with silent admiration we came upon a canal fete, a few miles below Lewiston. The young gentlemen and ladies of that village, the elite, I presume, of the region, for there were great numbers of fair and fresh faces, the wild roses of the mountains, were assembled to celebrate the letting in of the waters. They had come down from the town in the first canal boats, with bugle and clarionet and horn, as gay, as mountain air, and youth and such a spectacle could render them. We were courteously invited to leave our jolting conveyance, and take a place on the boats, along with the gay and fair, in their triumphal return to the town. The countenance of my clerical companion kindled, as the band echoed among the hills, and seemed, as if he were mentally doing the whole into verse. But fatigue and the severer admonitions of years, counselled selfdenial; and we saw the merry group moving off to a march on the band, as we resumed our jolting vehicle. We passed the night at Lewiston, and in the stillness of its watches heard the tones of the band, and the sounds of joy, as the party arrived at the village. As an offset to this cheerful and spirit stirring scene, next day our carriage broke down; but fortunately without accident, and just as we had arrived within sight of the tavern, where we were to change horses. This accident imposed upon us the necessity of resuming at the tavern a crazy and dilapidated stage coach, which had been laid up, as unroad worthy. In this miserable conveyance, without lanthorns, we rode through our last stage of some miles in Egyptian darkness, over more than one bridge without railing, through gloomy woods, over execrable roads, chequered with ravines and paved with nature laid stones. None could be so insensible to danger as not to feel the chances of our way, as we moved over the bridges, and through the forests, now poised for an overturn on a rock, and then surging to a counterpoise in a gully. By the protection of providence we arrived safe at our welcome inn, after ten at night. The next day, our frail machine broke down completely, and left us in showers and deep mud, to make our way up a mountain, as we might, five miles to a place, where we were to find a carriage. Our course was through one of the majestic forests of that wild region, with huge hemlocks and poplars intermixed. We took shelter from a shower in the cabin of an Irish settler. Never was dirtier establishment, or more beautiful children, or appa rently more happy inmates of the lonely hills. We moved on cheerfully through the mud and showers, my companion making the woods vocal with gay snatches of recited fragments of verse. Soon after, as we were once more replaced in a new carriage, one or two of the fullest toned vollies of thunder burst among the ancient mountains, the echoes dying away in the forests; and we could not but be sensible, that we were indulged with all the usual luxuries of travelling in mountainous regions, muddy and bad roads, broken down carriages, ordinary fare rendered luxurious by keen appetites and last, though not least, a tempest of rain and mountain thunder. West of the mountains we passed through the rapidly increasing town of Blairsville, which we entered, while one of our facetious companions, who had furnished us no little amusement, was singing a parody, to me the most laughable and inimitable of all parodies. It was a German travesty of a hunting song; and as he sang it, and two or three other western young men joined in the chorus, to me it was perfectly irresistable, and would have relaxed to a smile all sadness, but despair. I remember a stanza or two, but the verses want the tune, the tones and gestures of the singer, The tusky night came down from the skies, Und brought a peautiful morn; Und the hoonds they make a hellniferish noise, Some rides horses, and some rides mares, As the hoonds, they make a hellniferish noise, Und the drumpeter sbeaks mit his horn. The remaining stanzas turn upon the excitement of the honest Dutchman's heart, by the beauty of the day, to the purpose of going a hunting. Betts, his fair wife, throws her arms around his neck,' and begs him not to expose himself to the dangers of the chase. But amidst the scampering of horses, mares and colts joost porn,' and the spirit stirring, and hellniferish noise of the hoonds,' and the 'sbeaking notes of the drumpeter,' nothing will detain the German. He unlocks the fair detention of his prison keeper, and says, for I will go a hoonting to-day; for I will go a hoonting to-day." Whether the verses are to the point or not, nothing could exceed the gaiety produced by the song; and in full chorus of that tune we began to descend the mountain, that opens to view the immense valley of the west. The prospect, not new to me, enchained the eye and the attention of my fellow-traveller. We reached Pittsburgh without accident. We mounted together the heights of the Monongahela; and from the eminence witnessed the meeting of the waters, that form the Ohio. We soon, and joyfully floated on its waters. But of short duration was our joy. We were grounded a few miles below Pittsburgh, and remained with what patience we might, two days, exhausted in efforts to get off. Another steamboat anchored not far above us. In an evening of rain we exchanged our grounded conveyance for a floating one. Next morning we moved triumphant ly by our late boat, still fast on the bar. But brief was our triumph. Our new boat was soon brought up, and we had another trial of our patience for two days and three nights. We then floated away, and landed without accident at Cincinnati. Travels in North America, in the years 1827 and 1828. By Captain BASIL HALL, Royal Navy. 2 vols. pp. 669. Carey, Lea & Carey: Philad. We forewarn the reader that our requisitions upon his patience shall be moderate. We do not mean to add to the inflictions, which the public have already endured from this book, and will strive to do, what we have to say upon it, as much as possible into short metre. The author shows, from beginning to end, of leaden head and iron bowels, stupid, unfeeling, ungrateful, a narrow minded tar, whose range of intellect has diminished, in proportion, as his voyages have been extended; with the burly box of his craniological apex more than commonly stuffed with the select bigotry and prejudice of John Bull. Yet this same Loo Choo Theban of a Captain Basil Hall, pretends to know all about us, from alpha to omega, and discusses our manners, improvements, our government, our present comfort and future prospects, as though his twaddle were ex cathedra, and quite a pennyworth. We answer, that if this long tissue of stupidity had been brought forth by an anonymous American traveller, it would not have paid the ink with which it was printed. But let the man of the Royal Navy condescend to eat our pudding and pies, and displace our southern families from their villas for his special accommodation, and his ponderous pages are scattered over the land by the popular breeze, as they were thistle down. Truly, it was a perverse thing in Jonathan, so to tease this man with hospitalities and shows; but the meekness with which he endures Capt. Hall's reproaches, and repays them by printing and purchasing his book, evinces, that, like a good puritan, he has been trained to kiss the rod. So may Americans always be repaid, when they run to dance attendance upon foreign travellers among us, who do not bear some marks of being men of sense and gentlemen. We remember to have read the story which some dozen of English travellers have told of us, within the last twenty years, from the veracious Mr. Ashe, who translated the language of our bears, made lake Erie discharge into the Miami, and stole Dr. Goforth's collection of Mammoth bones, down to the present book. Some of them find that our houses, and especially our churches, are movable and mounted upon wheels. Others, in the pure brilliance of invention and mother-wit, have discovered that a log cabin is not St. Paul's, aud that corduroy is inferior to M'Adamized turnpike; and bless themselves in instituting comparisons between Grosvenor Square and an incipient town in the American woods. To them it is a big shame,' that our wilful generation should not be taught to wor ship God after the ancient, orthodox and approved fashion by church and state Bishops. Much are they annoyed with our cruelty in not apportioning to the petted and spoiled first born mama's darling, a double portion, for the misfortune of primogeniture. Another admires, that the Americans can raise flour to sell, without planting wheat in drills, and can eat fat mutton without trench plowing, and alternating crops of turnips and clover. We were recently discussed by a famous chip of an oaken block, Lieut. Roos, of the Royal Navy too, whose book was found dyspeptic, even by John Bull himself, who can digest a pine knot, like an alligator. Last of all, the Captain himself, all block from heart of oak, comes over the sea, infinitely disposed to think well of us, and travels from the re motest north to the shores of Missouri, and finds our hospitable importu nities tiresome, our people at once boorish and insufferably vain, our strength, improvement, national importance, and future auspices grossly oyer-estimated. To him every thing he sees and discusses gives an opportunity of unfavorable comparison with the same things in his own country. He every where suffers from the want of the requisite distinctions in society, and the grand glitter and gilding of aristocratic polish. To him it is no moot point, that a hundred thousand cabin cotters breathe the free air of the umbrageous primitive woods, and eat their fowls and pones and hog and hommony, when and how they choose, since they are more than balanced in England by one duke with a dominion of ten leagues in extent, who can bathe in cream, and show an example of elegance and comfort worthy of all imitation. It relaxes him not to more favorable feeling, to record, that we import our opinions, our literature, our books, our manufactures, arts and elegancies from that country. At the close of his travels, and in giving the summary of his impressions, he is disappointed in us, he says, and thinks, that no close intimacy between the two countries is like to spring up, nor, all things considered, that we ought to desire it. It is a fact out of question, that we of the United States have a deep laid and innate wish to be well with the parent country, to feel affectionately, and to think reverently in relation to it. The government has to thank such wooden headed chroniclers, as Captain Hall, et id omne genus, if a national hatred be fostered between the two people, as deep and exterminating, as the suicide Dido invoked between Carthage and Rome. No wonder, that the people of the little island, so noted, the world over, för their native pride and prejudice, should think of us, as they do. No wonder at the accounts of us in the London Quarterly, and the other publications, which convey to us the manifestations of ministerial and cockney estimation of us. Let them look to this result, after the lapse of that brief interval, which will be requisite, to give us triple the population of the two islands of that empire. An enlightened traveller from England, a man of sense, a gentleman, with a sprinkling of mental enlargement and philosophy, who should sojourn among us, and impartially relate the good and the evil of our country and institutions for the instruction of his own, would be a benefactor to both people. But from the analogy of the past, we have no right to hope such a phenomenon. In regard to the manner of the book in question, we imagine, but one opinion has been elicited. The mass of matter is dull, cerulean, heavy, without a single scintillation, or a kindly gleam from beginning to end the revolting twaddle of a rude, narrow minded English sailor, commenting upon institutions, a government, and systems of political economy, about which he is well nigh as ignorant, as a Cherokee of Arabic. He talks sentiment too, abundantly, and has store of pity for this case of misery and that, and declaims with his own peculiar eloquence, against slavery. But the manifest and palpable impress of the whole book, from commencement to close, is of a sneering, selfish, ignorant Englishman, solely engrossed in his own individual comfort, following his assiduous entertainers to see our lions, and returning to put down in his tablets such notes of us, as he and Madam Hall talked over in private, laughing at us in the same style with the vile parasite, who goes from the table and the courtesies of hospitality, to travesty, ridicule, and traduce all, that he has seen and partaken. But enough of this. Let us see a few of the good natured views, which our traveller has presented of us for ministerial comfort and illumination. At first putting foot upon our shores, he found the circle at his boarding house entrenched in cold, imperturbable and unsocial formality. The most common of all his complaints is, being teased and annoyed with civilities. The people vexed him with enquiries, how he liked our country; and when he could not give unqualified praises, were dissatisfied. At the fires in our cities the boys made horrid noises, in running after the engines. He visited a school in New York, and the mistress sustained a pupil in reading shivalry, after the French primitive, instead of tchivalry, after the orthodox canons of Walker. The pictures in New York were flat, cold and woodeny'! He heard an orator praise the country immoderately; and, good, easy man, he swallowed it all for gospel; and lo! it was found all a hum. Nothing was more unexpected, than to see so many men in arms at trainings. But a fig, says Capt. Hall, for our militia. He is clear, that men, who had never been trained at all, could more easily be disciplined to service, than this wretched show of arms. ‘I find from my notes,' he says, that the most striking circumstance in the American character is their constant habit of praising themselves, either in downright terms, or by some would be indirect allusions, which were still more tormenting.' At one time Capt. Hall and Co. piteous to relate, worn down with sightseeing, were incontinently hungry, and feasting their imaginations with the veal cutlets and red cabbage pickles of merry England, when instead, God bless the mark! they were obliged to set down to bread and butter, hung beef, which had been kept much too long, and a plate of eggs, altogether, a very poor dinner.' They had not expected much, for it was an unfrequented road. What will the reader believe, Capt. Hall of the Royal Navy did in this case. Why instead of grumbling, as he well might, he made a good laugh! Oh! you naughty surcharged wit of the Royal Navy. 6 But worse remains. After this 'scraggy' dinner, he went to look for the driver; and here was my gentleman in the kitchen, dining comfortably on an honest joint of roast lamb, large enough to have served all the party, the said driver inclusive. But the fellow with a half sort of grin' explained the whole affair in a manner, which our traveller sets forth in detail; and such is a fair specimen of the miserable twaddle of these volumes, so bepraised in the London Quarterly, and the greater part of the English |