placed. The charge against the one is, that he felt too much; against the other, that he felt not at all, for the misery of the royal sufferers. For Mr. Burke's turbulence, if turbulence it must be called, we have nothing to say, but that as charity is said to cover a multitude of sins, we presume she will best excuse her own excesses. As to the author of the Vindicia, we recommend him to that mercy which he forgot in the case of others, and accept his own apology for what it is worth. It seems he did not mean what he said. We cannot forbear having one word at parting, on the propriety of another charge brought against the "Reflections," viz. that they contain "homilies of moral and religious mysticism.' We cannot help doubting whether the author of this charge is in the slightest degree acquainted with the homilies of our church-we doubt also whether he knows what he means by "moral mysticism." But what is designed by the phrase "religious mysticism," we may negatively infer from an opinion delivered by the same author in the last page but three of his book. Speaking of the majority of the advocates of the French revolution, he remarks, that "they were well known to be philosophers and friends of humanity, who were superior to the creed of any sect, and indifferent to the dogmas of any popular faith." What this grand independence of all creeds, this sovereign, self-satisfied security of mind, falsely called philosophy, really is, we can be at no loss to understand, Its high negative worth is not ill set forth in a poetical work, of which we have, in the first article of our sixth number, laid before our readers a pretty full examination.* But we cannot conjecture to what part, passage, sentence, or line of the "Reflections," this objector means to attach the imputation of religious mysticism. The only religious matter we find in the whole volume is in the few pages which Mr. Burke has assigned to the consideration of the necessity, beauty, and advantage of a religious establishment, and of the inseparable connexion between church and state. Simple, indeed, must be the religion of that man, who is offended with the mysticism of an endeavour to point out the connexion between the civil and ecclesiastical parts of the constitution of England. What a monkish melancholy mystic poor Hooker must appear to such a man, and what must he think of the dreams of those wild enthu siasts, who connect spirit with body, eternity with time, a future state with the present, corruptible with incorruptible, dust with divinity. What must he think of that Mysterious power! Revealed yet unrevealed! darkness in light! * See the third and fourth stanzas of the second canto. Number in unity! our joy, or dread! Absconding, yet demonstrable, great GOD! To some men all religion is mysticism, as all church discipline is priestcraft. The mere rejection of religion is the philosophy of those whose title to the dignity of free thinking consists in a bigoted unbelief. The truth is, that through the whole course of Mr. Burke's volume, we do not recollect that he introduces the mention of any of those parts of religion which are properly called mysterious. So much for the "homilies of religious mysticism" to be found in Mr. Burke's Reflections. Mr. Burke constructed an immortal edifice to be the mansion of sound philosophy, the habitation and home of exiled truth. The author of the Vindicia Gallicæ, being determined to consider it as a haunted house, has peopled it with mysterious beings, and midnight bugbears, the progeny of his own metaphysical brain. Scelestæ hæ sunt ædes, impia est habitatio. Quæ hic monstra fiunt, anno vix possum eloqui. How deeply the mind of Mr. Burke, adverse to all visionary politics, all violent changes, and all practical invasions of liberty and property, was affected by the proceedings of the French revolutionists, and impressed with the danger to be dreaded from the diffusion of their principles, was manifested by the extraordinary exertions of which he showed himself capable at a time of life, and in a state of infirmity, which dispense with the labours of the patriot, and usually put a period to active service. To stay the plague, he stood, like Phineas, between the living and the dead. The mortification of losing some of his political friends was unable to chill his ardour. He felt the difficulty and the danger increased by this accession to the enemy; but the reaction of his mind was equal to the pressure. His resources kept on a level with the emergency. And the history of man presents few grander spectacles than that of this distinguished person, oppressed with years, weakened by labour, separated from the most powerful of his former friends, with a bosom rent by domestic calamity, making head against a revolutionary frenzy, which had let loose the physical against the moral world, threatened the dissolution of all states and communities, and proffered its bloody embrace to the people of this island. On such a subject, in such an hour of peril, he could not brook what seemed to him an unprincipled forbearance in those, for the right use of whose abilities their country so imperiously called. Much less could he endure the studied eulogies pronounced by Mr. Fox and his adherents on what seemed to him so manifestly to threaten the safety of the British empire. But to hear himself charged with having formerly held very different principles from those he then maintained; and to hear it alleged that the principles he then reprobated had been formerly learned from himself, was more than his ardent temper, wrought up to an extraordinary state of impressibility on the particular topic, and rendered, perhaps, somewhat more irritable by age and disappointment, could listen to with decorous patience. Some disparaging observations made by Mr. Fox on the "Reflections," it is said, had been conveyed to him. Putting all these things together, we are to consider how far they go in excuse of that renunciation of Mr. Fox as his friend, in which he persevered to the conclusion of his life. To say that he never forgave Mr. Fox, is an assertion unsupported by proof. He died, declaring a catholic forgiveness of all injuries and offences. And though we do not forget the boundless extent of the christian precept of forgiveness, yet we cannot consider that even christianity requires that we should live in harmony and society with those whose maxims and principles appear to us to militate against the repose of mankind. That these separations, coöperating with the effect which had been produced by his excessive and unseemly violence in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings, greatly diminished his popularity and influence, is not to be denied. In the latter years of his life he found it difficult to detain the attention of the house. The pride of past service, and, perhaps, in some degree, the irritability of age, laid him open to the attacks of young men, who had known him only in those scenes in which the failure of temper had been mistaken for the decay of faculty. Urged to fury by the stings of flies, his high-mindedness sometimes forsook him, and he gave to his puny assailants an ungenerous triumph. He could not, as one of those great cattle, (to use his own simile,) repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, and chew the cud and be silent, despising the little, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. Retreating from a scene of exertion, in which his value was so ill appreciated, he set about proving to the world that old age had not impaired his faculty. How far he succeeded may be judged from the perusal of his different pamphlets on the French revolu tion. As Philopatris Varvicensis has seemed to consider himself deficient in justice to Mr. Fox, without adding to the catalogue of his excellencies the gift of prophecy, which, by a sort of qualify ing phrase, he calls "the faculty of presage" we challenge for Mr. Burke at least an equal share of this power of penetrating futurity. History, which is the register of the mortality of governments, had surely not withheld from Mr. Burke what she had communicated to Mr. Fox. And the peculiar cases which, in every constitution of government, have a tendency to dissolution beyond the power of any stated remedy, were, we will venture to affirm, at least as well understood by Mr. Burke as by Mr. Fox. To be plain, in the part which Mr. Fox has acted in politics, or in his speeches in the senate, we can perceive none of this prophetic spirit. He was, by profession and practice, a determined party man, furiously bent on destroying the credit of those who kept the government in their hands, to the exclusion of him and his friends. And if he possessed the gift of prophecy, his talent at least was no mystery, since every man in the country might easily anticipate what Mr. Fox would predict as the result of every measure proposed by the government of which he made no part. And this Philopatris Varvicensis must know, canting apart, to be the amount of Mr. Fox's supernatural gift of presage concerning the affairs of the country. After saying thus much on the prophetic spirit attributed to Mr. Fox, we will not represent Mr. Burke as a soothsayer; but we will venture to affirm, that on the article of the revolution in France, and its probable issue, the predictions of Mr. Burke have been confirmed in a manner that bears extraordinary testimony to the strength and wisdom of his calculations. Mr. Fox, at the date of that event, which he hailed as so auspicious in its promises, was a young man in comparison of Mr. Burke; but the young man was dreaming dreams, while the old man was seeing visions. To the last hour of his life, these visions were expanding the mind of Mr. Burke, and his pen was employed in promulgating them. And when he was no longer able to dictate to the senate, we may class him at least with the Fabricii, the Curii, and the Coruncanii, et cæteri senes qui rempublicam consilio et auctoritate defendebant. Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. By Major Amos Stoddard, Member of U. S. M. P. S. and of the NewYork Historical Society. 8vo. pp. 488. Philadelphia, published by Mathew Carey. 1812. [From the Eclectic Review, for August, 1813.] IF other indications of the national character would warrant us, we should be willing to impute it to a republican dislike of ostentation, that the Americans have hitherto made so little literary use of their originally immense territory, and of the vast addition to it in the recent acquisition of Louisiana. How different is the case among us, the people of monarchies. We see so much im portance in a little of the earth of our dominions, and in the sub stances that roughen its surface, that we should deem it a meanspirited surrender of the honour due to our mundane rank, to leave any considerable district in the humble condition of merely being shone upon by the sun, pastured by the cattle, tilled and reaped by the men, speckled here and there with houses, and, perhaps, loaded in some part with a ponderous town. The district is not to be contented with so vulgar a share of the world's fortunes. It cannot be satisfied it has any respectable existence, till it is raised into renown by a costly topographical quarto, or even, if it is a particularly ambitious lot of acres, by the whole graphical and typographical honours of an imperial folio. These tributes of respect to our soil, and to what it carries, are multiplying so prodi-` giously, that if any account is to be kept of their number, and any reckoning of their cost, nothing could be more lucky and oppor tune than that the Americans, not wanting him for any such purpose themselves, have sent us Zerah Colburn, the youthful prodigy of computing faculties. And if it were possible we could a little extend the homestead of our territory-if we could get secure possession of a small segment of one of the northern departments of France, or a few parishes in the quarter of Walcheren, or a reasonable piece of Zealand, what a multiform and crowding accession a few months would bring to the vast accumulation of descriptions, surveys, sketches, and local histories, which have illustrated our present allotment of Europe. All this while, those Americans are leaving hundreds of thousands of their square miles without an adventure of research, a measurement, a map, a Flora, or a set of views; leaving them, with barely or hardly the distinction of a name, to display the va rious aspects of climates, and the changing aspects of seasons, for the unparticipated and unenvied entertainment of elks and buffaloes, bears, rattle-snakes, bull-frogs, and the constantly diminishing remainder of a genus of animals still wilder. If they are occa sionally moved, by some commercial prospect, to send a deputation of eyes across a few parallels of the hemisphere, it is marvellous to find how little shall at last be brought back besides the inplements of sight themselves—at least, how little shall be reported for the benefit and amusement of the inquisitive multitudes of us that cannot afford to carry our own eyes so far. The meager publication of Patrick Gass is nearly all that we have yet gained of the story and results of the late expedition from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and back again. But perhaps all in good time. Every thing that we do here, they, in due season, will do there. There exists, in unmarked spots, in the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, in that of the Ohio, of the Missouri, of the Columbia, clay that is destined to be one day dignified into bricks, and raised into structures, where royal quarto and folio shall be manufactured, and Paternoster-rows whence they will issue out in |