ciplined European battalions with troops of wild and half-naked hunters, to fight battles almost without arms, and sustain the public expenditure almost without money. But those things are the miracles of a war for liberty, and he wrought those miracles. He has now attained the highest reward that can be given to man. He sees the work of his own gallant hands and generous heart in the freedom of his boundless country. The name of Bolivar will be honoured by the latest posterity. But he has not been left to the tardy justice of the grave. His glory throws a light round his living steps. His name is written before his eyes in the temple of immortality.

It is a striking and most important feature in the intercourse of this invaluable portion of the New World with England, that it promises to be wholly peaceful. There is no probable ground for war; no intermediate territory to which both can cast a jealous eye, no ancient bickering, no rivalry of trade. The obvious interest of the republics is peace, and peace with England above all other nations. They have been led forward by her powerful hand from the first moment; they have been recognised in Europe first by her, they have been sustained by her finance, they are clothed and furnished by her manufactures. They are rapidly filling with the enterprise and productive vigour of the English mind. In a few generations, unless some most disastrous and most unexpected event should cloud those fortunate prospects, they will be but England on a larger scale.

The West Indies are at once the warehouses from which this opulent connection will be supplied along the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and the fortresses by which it will be defended.

The prospects of England in this quarter are not yet exhausted. A still more superb resource awaits her commercial grandeur. In a few years, the Isthmus of Darien will be an isthmus no more, but the gate of the highway of all nations. The whole coast of Japan and its archipelago, hitherto almost prohibited to European activity, the jealous frontier of China, the semi-barbarous, yet opulent states bordering the seas from Formosa to Malaya, will be inevitably thrown open. No political restraint can guard the immense shore of eastern and southern Asia, when once the passage shall be open through Mexico. All the forces of all the sovereignties of the East could not repel the perpetual and powerful allurements, that will be offered to the popular interests by an unrestrained interchange of their produce for the manufactures and luxuries with which commerce comes full-handed.

The present voyage from the Thames to China generally occupies five months. The ship's course, in that time, from the variety of winds, and other causes, is seldom less than from thirty to forty thousand miles. The outfit for this extensive voyage, the hazards of the course through difficult seas, and the natural slowness of the returns, have hitherto restricted the commerce of European nations

with the east and south coast of Asia, more than all the fiscal regulations of its governments.

By the opening of the isthmus, the whole voyage will be made almost on a Parallel, with almost a single wind, the Trade. This great sea-gate once passed, there lies before the navigator an immense expanse of ocean, that well deserves its name. The Pacific is of all seas the most unruffled. A brief period of storm comes at its regular season, as if merely to clear the impurities of this quiet world of waters and its tepid atmosphere. Thenceforth all is calm for months together. The central zone of the Pacific is swept by the trade wind. All to the north and south is the very region for the steam-boat; this unequalled invention, by which a new power is given to us over nature, and man is made lord of wind and tide, storm and calm.

But England, sharing with all other nations in the advantages of this new and incalculable increase of the riches of the world, or rather taking the lead in this great path of opulent discovery as she had done in all others, will derive, besides from her position in the West Indian islands, an influence altogether independent of her commercial enterprize. They intercept the whole Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. The gate may be in the hands of America, but the road to it is in the hands of England. She could shut it up at a moment. Not a sail from Europe could pass, if she prohibited it from her West Indian throne.

Alternatives like these are to be deeply deprecated. No man friendly to human nature, or to the supremacy of England, which is identified with the freedom, happiness, and security of human nature, can desire to see the world again thrown into a state of hostility. But if this stern alternative should arise, here stands the citadel, from which the Mistress of the seas can shake both hemispheres !

Turning to the north of this continent, the foundations of a new empire are laid in Canada. The region is to all actual purposes boundless. Stretching from Nova Scotia, in forty-four degrees north latitude, to the Pole, and from Newfoundland to the Pacific, through eighty degrees of longitude. If it be objected, that the Canadas are still a wilderness, and visited with intense cold, it is fairly answered, that their whole extent seems capable of sustaining life, as is shown by the residence of the Indian tribes, and by the hunters of the Hudson's Bay, and North-west Companies; that the most populous portion of Russia is twenty degrees to the north of the American line of Upper Canada; that Montreal lies in nearly the same parallel which cuts through the south of France, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea! And, above all, that the colonists who are now crowding to that country are Englishmen, a race proverbially successful in all the tasks to be achieved by patient vigour, and fearless adventure. These men require only room; their

native energies will do the rest. The forest will be cleared, the morass drained, the prairie will be a corn-field, the sandy hill will bear the vine; the huge lakes, those Mediterraneans of the New World, will be covered with the products of the mineral and agricultural wealth of the country; coal has been already discovered in great abundance; iron and the various metals are already worked; the hills abound in every kind of limestone, from the roughest grained, up to the purest marble. The climate is singularly healthy. The higher latitude repels all the summer epidemics that ravage the United States. Even in the severity of winter, all that is injurious will probably yield to the thinning of the forests, the drainage of the swamps, and the other labours of the accumulating population. The temperature of the European climates has gradually given way to the same means. The north of France was, at the time of the Roman conquest, incapable of rearing the vine. The north of Germany was the habitual seat of winter. The frost and damps, more than the sword of Arminius, repelled the Roman soldier, seasoned as he was, beyond all other men, to all vicissitudes of climate. But whatever may be the dreams of England's supremacy in this quarter of the globe, in one thing she cannot be a dreamer, — in the lofty and cheering consciousness that she has laid the foundation of a great society, where before there was a wilderness. Whether the Canadas shall retain their allegiance, or shake it off, there will be at least human beings where there was once solitude; law, where there was once the license of savage life; religion, where the Indian worshipped in brutish ignorance. England will have held the wand, that struck the waters from the rock, and filled the desert with fertility and rejoicing.

The European politics of England are at once too diversified, and too familiarly known, to be detailed here. She is at this hour the bond that keeps Europe in amity. The succession of the Emperor Nicholas has made it necessary that she should ascertain the bearings of the Russian policy. She has sent the most distinguished General of Europe to explain her principles, and to receive the pledges of the Russian cabinet. His progress through the Continent has been like a continued triumph, a train of honours paid to the great soldier himself, and through him to his country. The affairs of Greece are probably among the objects of his mission; and humanity and the generous feeling that binds itself with the glorious recollections of that most memorable of all lands, will equally rejoice in the extinction of the bloody and useless war that now exhausts her.

But as a portion of the power of England, the possession of the Seven Isles, and Malta, give her a right to a decided interference in all that disturbs the tranquillity of the Mediterranean. If great European changes are to take place, the first will probably occur in this quarter; and whenever England shall be forced to the stern

necessity of war, she will stand on a height from which her thunderbolts will not be launched in vain.

We have not alluded to Ireland or Scotland as separate dependencies: they are constantly assimilating more closely to England, by the abolition of fiscal restrictions, by similarity of manners, and by identity of laws. The unhappy dissensions which throw Ireland back in the general progress will gradually yield to melioration of law, of local government, and of personal feeling.

We are not among those prophets of evil who exhibit their sagacity in seeing the seeds of ruin in the most palmy state of national good fortune. All the leading commercial powers have fallen. But England stands in a condition distinct from them all. All those states were exclusively commercial: they had no real foundation in the land. Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, Holland, had no territory extensive enough to give them a national existence independently of the sea: they were strips of territory, inhabited by men whose natural dwelling was on ship-board; they had no population that could meet the attack of the military powers that pressed them by land; their armour was in front, their backs were naked. All the maritime states were thus compelled to the perilous expedient of employing foreign mercenaries. The mercantile jealousy that uniformly refused the rights of citizenship to the neighbouring states, left the merchant naked in his day of danger. The French cavalry insulted the gates of Amsterdam at pleasure; the Austrians seized Genoa and besieged Venice, when an Austrian cock-boat dared not appear on the Adriatic. In older times, the mountaineers of Macedon tore down the defences of the Phenician cities, when their ships were masters of all from Syria to the Pillars of Hercules. Scipio found but a solitary force of mercenaries between the shore and the walls of Carthage.

From the catastrophe of those jealous, narrow, and feeble states, what argument can be drawn to the fate of the generous, the extensive, the powerful, and, above all, the free!

The population of the British isles is worthy of a great dominion. It probably amounts to twenty millions; and that vast number is generally placed under such fortunate circumstances of rapid communication and easy concentration, as to be equal to perhaps half as many more in any other kingdom. This facility of intercourse is one of the great elements of civilised strength. The rapid returns of merchandise are not more indicative of prosperous trade than the rapid intercourse of human kind is essential to national vigour. For whatever purpose united strength can be demanded, it is forwarded to the spot at once. If England were threatened with invasion, a hundred thousand men could be conveyed to the defence of any of her coasts within four-and-twenty hours!

Some common yet curious calculations evince the singular facility and frequency of this intercourse. The mail-coaches of England run over twelve thousand miles in a single night — half the circum

ference of the globe! A newspaper published in the morning in London is, by the same night, read a hundred and twenty miles off! The twopenny-post revenue of London alone is said to equal the whole post-office revenue of France! The traveller going at night from London, sleeps, on the second night, four hundred miles off! The length of canal navigation in the vicinage of London is computed to equal the whole canal navigation of France!

But the most important distinction between the materiel of British strength and that of the commercial republics is not merely in the extent but in the diversity of its population. The land is not all a dock-yard, nor a manufactory, nor a barrack, nor a ploughed field: our national ship does not sweep on by a single sail. With a manufacturing population of three millions, we have a professional population, a naval population, and a most powerful, healthy, and superabundant agricultural population, which supplies the drain of them all. Of this last and most essential class to permanent power, the famous commercial republics were wholly destitute, and they therefore fell. England has been an independent and ruling kingdom since the invasion in 1066, a period already longer than the duration of the Roman empire from Cæsar, and equal to its whole duration from the consulate, the time of its emerging into national importance.

But if the moment of arriving at pre-eminent prosperity should always be the destined moment of a nation's descent, England would be, beyond all existing nations, in peril. Her king at this hour commands a population more numerous than that of any other sceptre on the globe, (excepting the probably exaggerated, and the certainly ineffective, multitudes of China). He is monarch over nearly one hundred and twenty millions of men. With him the old Spanish boast is true: "On his dominions the sun never sets." But the most illustrious attribute of this unexampled sway is, that its principle is Benevolence! that knowledge goes forth with it, that tyranny sinks before it, that in its magnificent progress it abates the calamities of nature, that it plants the desert, that it civilises the savage, that it strikes off the fetters of the slave!

ART.IX. Diary of an Ennuyée. 8vo.

1826.

pp. 354.

10s. 6d. Colburn.

WE Confess that we have felt some embarrassment how exactly to treat this little volume. If it be really what it professes, the genuine diary of a young and broken-hearted woman, used sometimes to beguile her feelings, and sometimes to give vent to them, and never designed for other eyes than her own; if it be the genuine record of sorrows which appear to have hurried the writer to a premature grave, it is scarcely matter for cold and fastidious criticism. But if it be really all this, we would then say to the friends of the poor girl, that they ought never to have suffered its