those high in rank were very active. The love of money and pillage seem to have actuated them all, and from their superior knowledge or talents, they were enabled to practise more effectually those artifices of dissimulation which were intended to produce disclosures of the concealment of property. It was usual to see an officer of distinction enter the house of a Frenchman with whom he had been intimate, address him in friendly terms, and after obtaining from him his watch, plate, and money, under a solemn promise of saving his life, murder him.

Having now given you a general view of the whole system of the massacre, I shall proceed to the relation of some particular instances, with which I have become acquainted.

Mr. Lacairssade, the same whom I have mentioned under the initial letter of his name, was one of those gentlemen who had taken great pains to ingratiate himself into the favour of the grand dignitaries, by paying court to them and entertaining them at his table with splendor and luxury. He was invited to dine at Follin's, but suspecting perhaps some foul play, he declined the invitation. A party, however, of officers determined that he should not outlive that day, and in all probability wishing to satisfy their curiosity as to the contents of his iron chest, went to dine with him, and inhumanly killed him at his table.

Mr. Arnaud, the interpreter, of whom I have frequently spoken under the appellation of citizen A. who, from his services to Christophe, as a spy upon the whites, was the last man that one would have supposed to be a victim, was one of the first to feel the ingratitude and treachery of his black friends. He was stabbed and thrown from his balcony into the street, where he lay until night. His housekeeper, a woman of colour, finding that he was then not quite dead, took him into the house. On the following morning a searching party entered his room, and quickly despatched him with their bayonets.

Rimet, nominal commandant of the place, was also killed; and, in fact, not one of the courtiers, except the physician and a priest, who were preserved for their professional services, was left alive; a striking instance of the rewards with which flatterers and hypocrites may expect to be recompensed, when their utility no longer exists.

Madame George had once been a lady of respectable fortune, but having lost her estate by the revolution, she had been reduced to moderate circumstances. She was one of those females, who not having the means of supporting themselves and families in any other part of the world, had resolved to take their chance in the island, in preference to wandering among strangers in foreign countries, in poverty and distress. She had three amiable and beautiful daughters, the eld

est of whom was about seventeen years of age. She and the two youngest were hanged upon the balcony before their own door, and the eldest was either carried off into the mountains by some officer, or put to death, because she would not consent to become the wife of a black general who had seized upon her, and who, it is believed, had been instrumental in the murder of her mother and sisters.

Mr. Simonet, formerly a pastry cook in Philadelphia, was also among the victims. They hung him out of his window with a Bologna sausage round his neck, and the bone of a ham suspended over him. He had been employed to prepare nearly all the entertainments of the great men, for which he never was paid, and by putting him to death, they no doubt considered their debts as cancelled.

On the fourteenth of May, Dessalines left the Cape for Gonaives, by the way of Port de Paix, where he stopped to strike another blow. The massacre at the Cape was not completely suspended until his departure, by which time, two thousand five hundred persons had been barbarously murdered. It was then discovered, that notwithstanding the exertions of the quatrieme, many individuals had been so effectually concealed and protected by some humane citizens, that they had escaped the general wreck. These, with the number that had been saved by the government, amounting in all to about three hundred, now crept forth from their places of concealment, and were suffered to exist. Most of them are living here at this day.

I have several other circumstances to relate respecting this melancholy affair, which I shall defer until my next communication.

R.

CRITICISM FOR THE PORT FOLIO.

The life of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, the Crisis, Rights of Man, &c. &c. By James Cheetham. 8vo. pp 347. New-York. Southwick & Pelsue.

PAINE, like most of those characters whom the volcanic eruptions of revolutionary contest so often throw up from profoundest obsurity to amaze and terrify mankind, and who derive their celebrity from their ardor in the cause of reform, or their boldness in the attack of established truth, will seldom be fairly and impartially estimated in

his own age or country. These meteor exhalations which, rising from the disturbed feculence and sediment of society, thus flit and glitter through the gross atmosphere of the political world, appear to one eye as the friendly stars of the north, cheering and guiding the wanderer on his way, to others they blaze as fiery comets, the harbingers of pestilence and war; while in a third point of view their lustre disappears, and nothing is visible but a foul collection of heavy and pestilential vapors. Such is peculiarly the lot of Paine. Of those who know him but by his writings or his public character, and who have seen him only at a distance in the meridian splendor of his intellect and reputation, the friends of establishment and received opinion regard him with horror as the high-priest of infidelity, and the chief architect of that great system of revolution in which he bore so conspicuous a part, but of which he was in fact but a very inferior and subordinate agent; the political fanatic, on the other hand, and the bigoted and proselyting infidel gaze upon him with reverence as their venerable patriarch-the Newton of the moral world. WE, have seen him in his last years of imbecility, brutal with intoxication, dull with disease, the powerless engine of party virulence and local faction, the petty fomentor of petty discord, and the name of Paine at first recalls to our mind no other recollection than that of the garrulous egotist, the vain, querulous and sometimes doting old man. It is sometime before we can reflect that the very reverence or abhorrence thus entertained by different parties towards a man eminent only for intellectual exertion and little otherwise gifted either by nature or fortune are alone sufficient to evince him to have possessed no common powers of mind. A great mind like a great edifice cannot be judged of by too near an inspection, to examine it fairly we must retire to the proper point of view. Posterity will do this. Let us cast aside the feelings of the moment, endeavour to place ourselves in the situation of posterity, and like honest chroniclers "speak of him as he was."

The great and most striking feature in the character of Thomas Paine is that intellectual courage, that bold decision and unwavering confidence in his own powers which enable the possessor coolly to mark out with the eye his destined course, and then to advance with firm and steady step, careless of consequence, fearless of public opinion. When at the commencement of our revolution our chiefs and leaders stood hesitating between remonstrance and rebellion, Paine first burst forth upon the world. The language, if not the feeling of loyalty was at that time, everywhere prevalent, and the colonists had not learnt to look upon themselves in any other light than as "his majesty's most oppressed but still dutiful subjects. He marshalled them the way where they should go, and pointed out the path which

led to independence. His COMMON SENSE, speaking a language (which, to borrow a happy phrase of Mr. Cheetham's) the people had felt but not thought, was received at once with that lucid conviction with which we receive a mathematical truth for the first time, and every man wondered why that which was now so clear had not always been familiar. The impulse thus given, ceased not till it had vibrated throughout the whole continent, and to the mental intrepidity of this single man must be ascribed the praise of having hastened although not of having caused the revolution.

The same hardihood of mind is visible throughout every act of his literary life, from his daring attacks upon the established creed of his country, down to his virulent invective against general Washington, at that time the favourite of every friend of regulated liberty and the idol of popular applause.

The peculiar advantage of this trait of character às it respects the individual, is to give to every power of his mind the fullest and most entire effect of which it is capable, to suffer no talent to wither and die away in neglect, chilled by diffidence or nipped by disappointment, to enable him to seize upon every auspicious moment of his life, to spread wide the canvass to every favouring breeze, and to take at the flood every tide in the affairs of men. With respect to its effect upon society, it is of a more ambiguous nature, and powerfully tends either to good or evil, as it arises from generous or selfish motives. To good, when its source is from without, when it springs from high and honourable principle or from benevolent zeal for the service of our friends, our country, or our kind. Generally to evil-when it springs from self, and is supported by the mere conceit or consciousness of intellectual strength. This remark applies with peculiar force to the influence of this disposition upon moral speculation and the elucidation of truth.

Our moral habits and affections are so intimately connected and blended with our rational powers, that humility of heart is not less necessary to the successful investigation of truth than clearness of head; and the most eagle-eyed acuteness may mistake the path of knowledge when we are hurried forward by arrogance, which will never pause to doubt its own conclusions or by passion seeking only its own gratification and blinding us to every obstacle that may oppose or check our desires. Hence it is that revelation in strictest conformity with good sense, assures us that divine truth to be fairly weighed must be received with the simplicity and purity of little children, that they cannot believe who seek only to receive honour from men, but that if any man be willing to do the will of the Father he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God. We cannot give a nobler literary example of this truth than by referring our readers to the admirable Analogy of bishop Butler, where Reason may be seen exerting herself

in her true sphere of action, humbly yet cautiously advancing step by step in the examination of the great laws of natural and revealed religion, looking upon things as they are, but never indulging idle dreams of what they might be ; borrowing light from our very ignorance and never daring to reject that which is tendered upon sufficient evidence, merely because she cannot comprehend. The argument upon which the system of Butler is founded, is indeed a noble one: it is not merely conclusive as to the subject in question, but places in the hand of the student a weapon from the armoury of heaven, which no invention of sophistry or scepticism can withstand. A more perfect .contrast to bishop Butler as a reasoner than Thomas Paine cannot well be selected. The first principle of the one is, that we are ignorant of many things, that of the other seems to be, that he at least, understands the whole plan of creation as it is or as it ought to be. Butler argues from individual facts upwards to general system. Paine boldly assumes his theory, sometimes true, always plausible, and then argues downward to the particular fact.

Confident in his own strength, and too-proud to doubt, Paine very seldom paused to consider whether his argument was conformable to the great analogy of nature, and founded upon broad and general principle, or whether he reasoned merely from prejudice or falsehood, or from some individual principle of human policy or feeling, just indeed in itself, but too narrow for the foundation of any general rule. Take, for an example of this mode of reasoning, his favourite argument against hereditary succession, viz. “That although men might by compact give up some portion of their own rights, this compact cannot possibly have any binding effect upon their posterity who were not parties to it." This, although founded upon a proposition true to a certain extent, yet if it prove any thing, proves too much; for the argument if good thus far must also hold good against the justice of the whole of the present system of society; since the necessary constitution of every civilized nation must always compel the children to submit to the whole system of laws and customs which had been ordained by their fathers, and to which they had never at any time given their express assent. Besides, what is the general operation of nature? has she not made one generation in no small degree dependant upon that which preceded it? are not parents enabled by their enterprise, their activity, or their invention, to better the condition of their posterity? and, on the other hand, must not the sons often necessarily succeed to the diseases, the ignorance, or the poverty of their sires?

Again-in his attempt to prove by what he terms moral evidence, the falsehood of the Mosaic history, he affects to consider the circum-} stance of the Israelites being commanded to extirpate the whole nation