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ginally Italian people-pirates-by name Campo bello; the same family as the Scotch Campbells and Norman Beauchamps. On this, the little aristocrat exclaims, How I wish it were 'true!' And (what is worse still) would rather be descended from a half-heathen Saxon giant than from William Penn himself, or than have the wealth of the earth for her dower! This is the fortune which she would like to conjure for herself. Fortunately, she is not quite so foolish in dealing with the interests of others as with her own. The sight of one of Stanfield's Annuals from the Rhine did not make her wish to turn America into a dreamland of romance. She was content with the aching of her own heart to be back again in Europe, in the old land of fairy tales,— the feudal world of legendary ruins. But, for America, in case ruined castles, and picture galleries, and cultivated refined society, are incompatible with a population of no poor, she is willing to leave it as it is. On that supposition, she says, 'I would not 'alter the present state of things if I could!' She would only get

away.

We must give a few examples of Mrs Butler's descriptive powers. The reader must suppose her fairly out at sea in the packet boat from Liverpool to New York.

'The ship scudded before the blast, and we managed to keep ourselves warm by singing. After tea, for the first time since I have been on board, got hold of a pack of cards (oh me, that it should ever come to this!) and initiated Miss in the mysteries of the intellectual game. Mercy! how my home rose before me as I did so. Played till I was tired; dozed, and finally came to bed. Bed! quotha! 'tis a frightful misapplication of terms. Oh for a bed! a real bed; any manner of bed, but a bed on shipboard! And yet I have seen some fair things: I have seen a universe of air and water; I have seen the glorious sun come and look down upon this rolling sapphire; I have seen the moon throw her silver columns along the watery waste; I have seen one lonely ship in her silent walk across this wilderness, meet another, greet her, and her, like a dream, on the wide deep; I have seen the dark world of waters at midnight open its mysterious mantle beneath our ship's prow, and show below another dazzling world of light. I have seen what I would not but have seen, though I have left my very soul behind me. England, dear, dear, England! oh, for a handful of your earth!'

sea.

pass

A few days after this, a change comes over the temper of the

'I fairly danced myself tired. Came to bed. But oh! not to sleep— mercy, what a night! The wind blowing like mad, the sea rolling, the ship pitching, bouncing, shuddering, and reeling, like a thing possessed. I lay awake, listening to her creaking and groaning, till two o'clock, when, sick of my sleepless berth, I got up and was going up stairs, to see, at least, how near drowning we were, when D- who was lying

awake too, implored me to lie down again. I did so for the hundred and eleventh time, complaining bitterly that I should be stuffed down in a loathsome berth, cabined, cribbed, confined, while the sea was boiling below, and the wind bellowing above us. Lay till daylight, the gale increasing furiously; boxes, chairs, beds, and their contents, wooden valuables, and human invaluables, rolling about and clinging to one another in glorious confusion.'

Her pretty appeal to Night, in the style of a fragment of 'Old 'Play, we should fear, must have been in vain

Night! silent nurse, that with thy solemn eyes
Hang'st o'er the rocking cradle of the world,
Oh! be thou darker to my dreaming eyes;

Nor, in my slumbers, be the past unfurled.

*

Night, thou shalt nurse me, but be sure, good nurse,
While sitting by my bed, that thou art silent;
I will not let thee sing me to my slumbers
With the sweet lullabies of former times,
Nor tell me tales, as other gossips wont,

Of the strange fairy days, that are all gone.'

On finding herself a little more sea-worthy, she says,

I got cradled among the ropes, so as not to be pitched off when the ship lurched, and enjoyed it all amazingly. It was sad and solemn, and, but for the excitement of the savage-looking waves, that every now and then lifted their overwhelming sides against us, it would have made me melancholy; but it stirred my spirits to ride over these huge sea-horses, that came bounding and bellowing round us.'

The land storm with which they were greeted at New York must have been still more terrific, with its holyday of the elements and its mad lightning-Wide sheets of purple-glaring flame, that 'trembled over the earth for nearly two or three seconds at a 'time; making the whole world, river, sky, trees, and buildings, look like a ghostly universe cut out in chalk.' In due time came her country rides, and the opportunity of admiring at her leisure the beautiful younger world which appears to her to have received the portion of the beloved younger son-the "coat of many colours.' Nevertheless, flowers in October, the very 'sackcloth season of the year,' cannot bribe her from her fealty to our English autumn :—

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Autumn is an emperor here, clothed in crimson and gold, and canopied with ruddy glowing skies. Yet I like the sad russet cloak of our own autumnal woods; I like the sighing voice of his lament through the va porous curtain that rises round his steps; I like the music of the withered leaves that rustle in his path; and oh ! above all, the solemn thoughts that wait upon him; as he goes stripping the trees of their bright foliage, leaving them like the ungarlanded columns of a deserted palace.'

Her partial feelings move with equal grace in their poetical attire :—

Oh! not upon thy fading fields and fells

In such rich garb doth autumn come to thee,
My home!-but o'er thy mountains and thy dells
His footsteps fall slowly and solemnly.

Nor flower, nor bud, remaineth there to him,
Save the faint-breathing rose, that, round the year,
Its crimson buds and pale soft blossoms dim,
In lowly beauty constantly doth wear.
O'er yellow stubble lands, in mantle brown,
He wanders through the wan October light;
Still as he goeth, slowly stripping down

The garlands green that were the spring's delight.
At morn and eve thin silver vapours rise

Around his path; but sometimes at mid-day
He looks along the hills with gentle eyes,

That make the sallow woods and fields seem gay.
Yet something of sad sov'reignty he hath-
A sceptre crown'd with berries ruby red;
And the cold sobbing wind bestrews his path

With withered leaves that rustle 'neath his tread ;
And round him still, in melancholy state,

Sweet solemn sounds of death and of decay,

In slow and hush'd attendance, ever wait,

Telling how all things fair must pass away.'

She has even more brilliant things to say of winter, both in verse and prose, and of its clusters of " enormous crystal grapes, the pendant adornments of the silver-fingered ice-god. We beg to remind her that the case for, and against, church music, is not fairly tried, when they sing Psalms to the tune of Come live with me and be my love. However, she shall remain in quiet possession of her articles of faith, whether against soft church music or in favour of stern sermons, out of consideration of her quaint simile-so new and yet so like. The day was most 'lovely, and my eyes were constantly attracted to the church windows, through which the magnificent willows of the burial'ground looked like golden-green fountains rising into the sky.' She must have been thinking of the glorious fountains at Saint Peters. It was not near so pretty in her to visit a fidgety little child, in the corner of her pew, with a wish for the days of King Herod.

Her sketches of scenery, on her journey from Baltimore to Washington, at Trenton Falls, and round Boston, are all very picturesque. The figurantes thrown in to give life to a Claude or Poussin, do not do their work half so well as the outline of her

follow. The next is one of them. It passes, we dare say, now and then between father and daughter in other parlours.

That we must live, I know, and that money is necessary to live, I know; but that our glorious capacities of soul, mind, and body, the fitting exercise of which alone in itself is happiness, should thus be chained down to the altar horns of Mammon, is what I never will believe wise, right, or fitting. I at length spoke, for my heart was burning within me, and burst into an eloquent lamentation on the folly and misery of which the world was guilty in following this base worship as it does. But when I said that I was convinced happiness might and did exist most blessedly upon half the means which men spent their lives in scraping together, my father laughed, and said I was the last person in the world who could live on little, or be content with the mediocrity I vaunted. I looked at my satin gown, and held my tongue, but still I was not convinced.'

There can be no question what name is to occupy the blank which follows. However, if he has many such stories to tell he need not care about his plainness.

Young

breakfasted with us. How unfortunately plain he is! His voice is marvellously like his father's, and it pleased me to hear him speak therefore. He was talking to my father about the various southern and western theatres, and bidding us expect to meet strange coadjutors in those lost lands beyond the world. On one occasion he said, when he was acting Richard the Third, some of the underlings kept their hats on while he was on the stage, whereat

remonstra

ted, requesting them in a whisper to uncover, as they were in the presence of a king, to which admonition he received the following characteristic reply: :-"Fiddlestick! I guess we know nothing about kings in this country!""

There is nothing like public rooms and public conveyances for teaching people to feel every where at home.

As to privacy at any time, or under any circumstances, 'tis a thing that enters not into the imagination of an American. They do not seem to comprehend, that to be, from sunrise to sunset, one of a hundred and fifty people confined in a steam-boat, is in itself a great misery; or that to be left by one's self and to one's self can ever be desirable. They live all the days of their lives in a throng, eat at ordinaries of two or three hundred, sleep five or six in a room, take pleasure in droves, and travel in swarms. In spite, therefore, of all its advantages, this mode of journeying has its drawbacks. And the greatest of all, to me, is the being companioned by so many strangers, who crowd about you, pursue their conversation in your very ears, or, if they like it better, listen to yours, stare you out of all countenance, and squeeze you out of all comfort. Young women here, accustomed to the society of strangers, mixing familiarly with persons of whom they know nothing earthly, subject to the gaze of a crowd from morning till night, pushing and pressing, and struggling in self-defence, conversing, and being conversed

with, by the chance companions of a boarding-house, a steam-boat, or the hotel of a fashionable watering-place, they must necessarily lose every thing like reserve or bashfulness of deportment, and become free and familiar in their manners, and noisy and unrefined in their tone and style of conversation. An English girl of sixteen, put on board one of these Noah's arks (for verily there be clean and unclean beasts in them), would feel and look like a scared thing.'

We think the Americans themselves must enjoy the following picture of the militia of New York, on the anniversary of the evacuation of the town by the British troops :

O, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! They were certainly not quite so bad as Falstaff's men, of ragged memory; for, for aught I know to the contrary, they, perhaps all of them, had shirts to their backs. But some had gloves, and some had none; some carried their guns one way, and some another; some had caps of one fashion, and some of another; some had no caps at all, but " shocking bad hats," with feathers in them. The infantry were, however, comparatively respectable troops. They did not march many degrees out of the straight line, or stoop too much, or turn their heads round too often. Mr remarked, that militia were seldom more steady and orderly in their appearance. But the cavalry! oh, the cavalry! what gems without price they were! Apparently extremely frightened at the shambling tituppy chargers, upon whose backs they clung, straggling in all directions, putting the admiring crowd in fear of their lives, and proving beyond a doubt how formidable they must appear to the enemy, when, with the most peaceable intentions in the world, they thus jeopardied the safety of their enthusiastic fellow-citizens. Bold would have been the man who did not edge backwards into the crowd, as a flock of these worthies a-horseback came down the street-some trotting, some galloping, some racking, some ambling; each and all "witching the world with wondrous horsemanship." If any thing ever might be properly called wondrous, they, their riders and accoutrements, deserve the title. Some wore boots, and some wore shoes, and one independent hero had got on grey stockings and slippers !'

Mrs Butler takes up, in passing, many graver subjects of remark. Among them, she hits off very justly the principal causes of the difference between male and female religion:

The fragile frame, the loving heart, and the ignorant mind, are in us sources of religious faith. But it often happens that those affections, so strong, so deep, so making up the sum and substance of female existence, instead of being happily employed, are converted into springs of acute suffering. These wells of feeling hidden in the soul, upon whose surface the slightest smile of affection falls like sunlight, but whose very depths are stirred by the breath of unkindness, are too often unvisited by the kindly influence of kindred sympathies, and go wearing their own channels deeper, in silence and in secrecy, and in infinite bitterness,— undermining health, happiness, the joy of life.'