with life, and requires an easier effort of the imagination to travel beyond the eye. The other is grand, but dreary, desolate, and always ready to destroy. In the most pleasing positions of these prairies, we have our Indian mounds, which proudly rise above the plain. At first the eye mistakes them for hills; but when it catches the regularity of their breastworks and ditches, it discovers at once that they are the labours of art and of men. When the evidence of the senses convinces us that human bones moulder in these masses, when you dig about them and bring to light their domestic utensils, and are compelled to believe that the busy tide of life once flowed here, when you see at once that these races were of a very different character from the present generation, you begin to inquire if any tradition, if any the faintest records can throw any light upon these habitations of men of another age. Is there no scope, beside these mounds, for imagination, and for contemplation of the past? The men, their joys, their sorrows, their bones, are all buried together. But the grand features of nature remain. There is the beautiful prairie, over which they "strutted through life's poor play." The forests, the hills, the mounds, lift their heads in unalterable repose, and furnish the same sources of contemplation to us that they did to those generations that have passed away.'

The most liberal American, however, can rarely close, without betraying a little of the sourness that leavens the general tone of their disquisitions as to the former and present state of things on this side the Atlantic. Thoroughly sympathising in the feelings which he has hitherto been describing, we are pulled up in considerable disgust, when we find Mr. Flint seriously talking as if he fancied it possible that these mound-strewn prairies had been, in the olden day, the abodes of nations, not only equal, but in various respects superior to the Europeans of the middle ages. Of such poor bigotry, based on such solid ignorance, we should never have expected to discover a specimen in the same book with the beautiful passages we had been quoting. Here, however, is the Yankee mark.

It is true, we have little reason to suppose that these mounds were the guilty dens of petty tyrants, who let loose their half-savage vassals to burn, plunder, enslave, and despoil an adjoining den. There are no remains of the vast and useless monasteries, where ignorant and lazy monks dreamed over their lusts, or meditated their vile plans of acquisition and imposture. Here must have been a race of men on these charming plains, that had every call, from the scenes that surrounded them, to contented existence and tranquil meditation. Unfortunate, as men view the thing, they must have been. Innocent and peaceful they probably were; for had they been reared amidst wars and quarrels, like the present Indians, they would doubtless have maintained their ground, and their posterity would have remained to this day. I cannot judge of the recollections excited by castles and towers that

I have not seen; but I have seen all of grandeur which our cities can display. I have seen, too, these lonely tombs of the desert,-seen them rise from these boundless and unpeopled plains. My imagination had been filled, and my heart has been full. The nothingness of the brief dream of human life has forced itself upon my mind. The unknown race to which these bones belonged had, I doubt not, as many projects of ambition, and hoped as sanguinely to have their names survive, as the great of the present day.'.

He seems to admit, then, that these ancient American worthies had their ambitions, in all likelihood quite as vivid and stirring as our own poor Gothic forefathers, who, by the bye, were his also: and it would appear, from his very next page, that, accepting his own interpretation of what he had before his eyes, his primeval innocents of the prairies had their blows and blood-shedding too. It is, in fact, very difficult to account for the immense accumulation of mouldering bodies that he describes, and the mark and importance of the mounds consecrated to their repose, otherwise than by supposing each gigantic tumulus to be the monument of a battle. At all events, this is much the most natural interpretation.

'The more the subject of the past races of men and animals in this region is investigated, the more perplexed it seems to become. The huge bones of the animals indicate them to be vastly larger than any that now exist on the earth. All that I have seen and heard of the remains of the men, would seem to show that they were smaller than the men of our times. All the bodies that have been found in that state of high preservation, in which they were discovered in nitrous caves, were considerably smaller than the present ordinary stature of men. The two bodies, that were found in the vast limestone cavern in Tennessee, one of which I saw at Lexington, were neither of them more than four feet in height. It seemed to me that this must have been nearly the height of the living person. The teeth and nails did not seem to indicate the shrinking of the flesh from them in the desiccating process by which they were preserved. The hair seemed to have been sandy, or inclining to yellow. It is well known that nothing is so uniform in the present Indian as his lank black hair. From the pains taken to preserve the bodies, and the great labour of making the funeral robes in which they were folded, they、 must have been of the "blood royal," or personages of great consideration in their day. The person that I saw had evidently died by a blow on the skull: the blood had coagulated there into a mass of a texture and colour sufficiently marked to show that it had been blood. The envelope of the body was double. Two splendid blankets, completely woven with the most beautiful feathers of the wild turkey, arranged in regular stripes and compartments, encircled it. The cloth, on which these feathers were woven, was a kind of linen of neat texture, of the same kind with that which is now woven from the fibres

of

of the nettle. The body was evidently that of a female of middle age, and I should suppose that her majesty weighed, when I saw her, six or eight pounds.'-p. 173.

During the author's stay near Maramec, in the county of St. Louis, another huge cairn was opened, and found to contain a great number of stone coffins; the skeletons within which were in general entire. Mr. Flint says, the coffins were, on an average, scarcely more than four feet in length; and speculates deeply on what the situation of so truly Lilliputian a human race must have been, if they were, which he scarcely doubts, the contemporaries of the mammoth. He describes the vessels of pottery-ware found in these stone coffins as evidently moulded with the hand, in imitation of natural forms, chiefly those of the gourd tribe; and we wish he had given us a wood-cut or two, both of them and the coffins that contained them. He might also have been expected to say something as to the workmanship of the coffins themselves; but really the whole of this subject may as well be deferred, until we have before us the evidence of some witness regularly trained in anatomical knowledge. Although it is entirely impossible to hesitate about adopting Mr. Flint's opinion, that these mounds and their contents furnish perfect proof of the existence of a vast and, comparatively speaking, a civilized primeval population in these regions, we must confess we have some lurking suspicion as to the Lilliputian remains. In describing the exhumated relics of one of the principal tumuli that came under his view, he says that 'the teeth were long, sharp, and separated by considerable intervals, reviving the horrible images of the nursery tales about ogres' teeth.' This casual observation, taken along with things that must have sufficiently arrested our reader's attention, makes us halt for further light before we adopt the author's sweeping conclusions about the existence of his pigmy empires. After all, in short, we are not without a suspicion, that these stone coffins, like many of the Egyptian mummy-cases, may have been framed for the reception of holy monkeys.

ART. VIII.-Osservazioni Semi-serie di un Esule sull' Inghilterra. 12mo. pp. 363. Lugano. 1831. THIS little volume is prettily written, and contains both de

scriptions and remarks of considerable merit. The author, Count Pecchio, one of the unfortunate persons who visited this country in consequence of the abortive attempts to revolutionize Italy in 1823, must have been personally known to many of our readers, and, judging from these pages, has no doubt left an agreeable impression of his character and manners. His notions

on

on religious and political subjects are such as might be expected from a Carbonaro; but here our censure stops. The gentlemanlike tone of the whole performance, the easy good-humour, lightness of heart, and modesty which pervade it, present a pleasing contrast to the spleen, insolence, and self-conceit of Prince Puckler Muskau- and may, we hope, find some favour with the public, now that they have had leisure to appreciate those flimsy rhapsodies, for which his highness's mean libels on individuals were able to win a nine days' vogue.

The Count makes no pretensions to regularity of plan; but gives us his observations on stage-coaches, British sailors, the tactics of the late opposition in the House of Commons, teagardens, lunatic asylums, the Unitarians, the quarter-sessions, &c. &c. in so many detached chapters, arranged, it would seem, fortuitously, and which were originally perhaps private letters. We need not, therefore, care at what page we open the book. The following lively description of his first night in a London lodginghouse, will probably introduce the author as well as anything else we could select:

The first night I felt as though I was still on board the steamvessel. The walls were just as thin, and for the most part of wood; diminutive apartments, and a staircase like that by which you get on deck. The partitions are generally slim enough to allow sounds to pass distinctly; so that the lodgers would make confidants of one another if they were not in the habit of speaking in a suppressed tone of voice. The murmur of the conversation of my neighbours overhead, and likewise that which was taking place underneath, reached my ears; and I could catch, from time to time, "very fine weather... indeed. ... very fine. . . . comfort. ... comfortable.... great comfort,"-words which occur as frequently in English discourse as commas in a printed page. In short, the houses are ventriloquous. They are moreover all alike; each house of three stories high, containing three sitting-rooms, and three sleeping-rooms, each placed perpendicularly, one over the other; so that the population are, in a manner, warehoused in layers, one above the other, like bales of goods, or cheeses in the warehouses of Lodi or Codogno.'

....

The Count proceeds to dilate on this subject, as if what was true of his pasteboard domiciles, ranged in Caroline Rows and Paradise Crescents about the purlieus of the Regent Canal, must needs be true of the capital in general. Among other speculations, he asks, and answers, the following deep questions:

'Why are the English such bad dancers? Because they have no practice. The houses are so small and slight, that if any body were to cut a caper on the third floor, he would run the risk of falling, like a shell, into the kitchen. Why do the English gesticulate so little, and keep their arms almost always glued to their sides?-For the

same

same reason, I think: the apartments are so small, that it would be impossible to use any gesticulation without breaking something, or incommoding somebody.'

The Count, in the midst of his merriment, gives a melancholy view of the position of the refugees upon their first arrival in this country. First we have the purveyor for the newspapers hurrying to their garrets, to beg the favour of, at least, a sketch of their lives, with a few anecdotes.' The newspaper paragraphs are followed by invitations to half-a-dozen fashionable parties, where the unfortunate gentlemen have the satisfaction of being exhibited as the lions of the evening. Grand applause from liberal lords -extravagant compliments from liberal ladiesa few dinners and breakfasts; and then, when the lion has played his part, come not at home '-utter neglect and the black mutton-chop again in the ventriloquous lodging.

6

The English people,' he says, and it is almost the only severe sentence in his book, the English people are greedy of novelty. In this single thing they are children, that they make no great distinction between good and evil, provided it is new. They pay for their magic lantern, and they pay well; but they like always to have new figures. To satisfy this insatiable whale, labour journalists, collectors of anecdotes, writers of history, travellers, men of science, lawyers, literary men, poets,-ministers, with drafts of new laws,-kings, with designs for new buildings,-liberals, with plans of parliamentary reform, &c.'

The Spanish exiles are those on whose distresses Count Pecchio dwells the most: he describes one distinguished Don as walking four miles to give a single lesson in Spanish; another, surprised in the act of mending his own trousers; a third, frequently without a farthing to pay for the basin of milk which was almost his sole nourishment, and obliged to lie in bed in winter, because he could not afford a fire. It does not appear that our author himself was reduced to such extreme difficulties: at all events, if he was, he utters no complaint beyond a passing remark that the profession of a teacher of languages, to which he was obliged to have recourse for subsistence, is a disagreeable one. Whether we are to trace this forbearance to his having caught, from the people amongst whom fortune had cast him, a portion of that unmurmuring spirit which, unlike most travellers, he attributes to our countrymen, or whether it is to be ascribed to a naturally cheerful and light-hearted temperament, we do not pretend to decide.

From the position which he at first occupied as a poor lodger in the outskirts of the metropolis, he could have had little opportunity of seeing any but the most unfavourable aspect of our

community,