of those who cannot take care of themselves; but no one, among us, so he has but health, needs to fall into poverty. Most things that may be honestly done for a living, are done by one or another of us. We fish, we manufacture, we till (credat Judæus !"), we trade, and we study. Our swapping transactions sometimes employ no little capital, and often carry us a long way from home. The commodore of a Russian exploring expedition lately fell into a fog, just as he had come to flatter himself that he had about reached the world's end, and written his name for immortality with the Vancouvers and Cooks. When it cleared away, he found himself in a fleet of Yankee craft, the commander of one of which offered to pilot him to an excellent roadstead hard by, the old familiar haven of himself and his compeers. Our colleges are in that condition, that, in addition to the granite and ice above commemorated, we find ourselves able to send into other States a few professional men, who, we learn, find a market, and every year, about commencement time, an assortment of teachers in the different ranks, from intructers in the common schools, to presidents and professors in the higher institutions. Each having enough to do of his own, people have the less reason to interfere with one another, except in the way of mutual kind offices, or joint action for public objects. Each being able to depend on himself, there is no motive for servility, and arrogance is awed by the certainty of a prompt and effective rebuke. Men know whom they are dealing with, as they cannot know in one of those recent communities, where a population is collected, not amalgamated; and so escape the tendency to that mutual distrust, which if not a virtue, is a necessity, where there is any strange companionship.

Wherever there is a combination of universal competence and moderate information, occasional wealth and habits of intellectual activity, it might be anticipated with confidence that there would grow up a taste for the elegances of art and literature, and all the refinements of the social state, even if the original stock were less propitious to such fruits than was that of New England. How we actually stand in these respects, it is clearly not for ourselves to judge; nor by any means do we covet to be the subjects of favorable comparisons with our fellow-citizens of other sections of the country. Still it is certain, that comparisons of this kind which are actually made

by strangers who visit us, to tell what they find, are not such as to distress our vanity. Captain Hall does not mince the matter. "Since coming to Boston," says he, "we have been more struck, and confessed ourselves to be so, with the degree of taste and luxury in all we saw, both in the external appearance of the houses, and in the good sense and good manners within, than with any thing we had before met in the United States." Mrs. Butler and M. de Tocqueville are scarcely less complimentary; and Captain Hamilton, well as he learned his lesson in some other respects, was fain to own that he found in Boston a circle of society, distinguished by "much taste for literature, much liberality of sentiment, a good deal of accomplishment, and a greater amount, perhaps, both of practical and speculative knowledge, than the population of any other mercantile city could supply."

All this looks very well on paper; but still there is reason to fear, that the character of the New England population does not stand altogether well with the multitude of their brethren. How any existing prejudice of the kind arose, it might not be difficult to conjecture; but it would be an invidious inquiry, and we decline it. That, having arisen, it has been perpetuated, is a fact that requires no explanation. An error capable of producing a political effect bears a charmed life. If such things are tolerably well nursed, and this they are very likely to be, so notoriously are they beyond the power of mere contradiction, that report says, a political tactician in Pennsylvania, in the canvass of 1828, observing what havoc was making among the votes of the foreign population by the story that the lady of Mr. Adams was a daughter of George III., advised not to waste breath in a denial of the statement, but to work a traverse by reporting that General Jackson had wedded two daughters of that monarch. But however originated or kept alive, the prevalence of the feeling in question, to some unhappy extent, is, we suppose, not to be denied. We learned as much from Captain Hamilton's own book. "The whole Union," says he, "is full of stories of Jonathan's cunning frauds." That traveller's swallow is quick and capacious, and we would rather not rely on him exclusively for such a statement; still its breadth and confidence attach to it a certain interest. Mr. Sprague, author of one of the addresses of which we have prefixed the title, (the late distinguished Senator from Maine,) knows better whereof he affirms, and he

goes so far as to say; "It has become so common with our brethren of other States, to talk of New England cupidity and fraud, that it is taken by the ignorant abroad to be characteristic of our community." Dr. Whitridge is a native of New England, long resident in the capital of South Carolina. His high station in society, accorded to him by the cordial respect of all to whom he is known, affords him the best opportunities for acquaintance with the state of prevailing sentiment. He too professes his endeavour to have been, in his address delivered on the anniversary of the disembarkation at Plymouth, "to rescue a section of our common country from unmerited reproach;" and specifies the nature of animadversions which have been made, as of the following flattering character.

"Yankees, it has been said, are like a rope of sand; that they have no sympathy for one another; that there is no adhesion among them, either at home or abroad; that they are mean and selfish in their disposition, sly, cunning, apt to overreach; in short, dishonest whenever they can get any thing by it; and that their motto virtually is, if not the avowed principle of action, 'Every man for himself, and God for us all.'”—p. 23. Here is a pleasant accumulation of compliments to ring on an honest people's ear. One cannot but hope at first, that there is some mistake in the representation, and that single petulant expressions of accidentally prejudiced persons have been taken, by individuals conscious of their own character and jealous for that of their birth-place, for indications of a prevailing sentiment. But we believe it will not do to lay any such flattering unction to our souls. Respecting the authorship of the "Memoirs of a Nullifier," the second work of which we have prefixed the title, we have no knowledge nor ground for suspicion. We have never heard it ascribed to any one but an aged gentleman, who, we are sure from internal evidence, did not write it. The author also professes to be a native of the South, which the individual referred to is not; and that this is not a mere nom de guerre, appears from a few southern provincialisms, occurring in what is generally an extremely good style. The work is "printed and pub

*Such as would, for should, in the following sentences; " I found that I would miss the planet by about fifteen inches," and "I hoped that some time or other I would arrive at a stopping-place I saw ;" and the use of dear so as to rhyme with fair, and tear with repair, in a copy of verses on page 36, indicating a well-known sectional peculiarity of pronuncia

tion.

lished at the Office of the Telegraph," a journal of well-known ability and influence, edited at the seat of government of South Carolina. That the author has not made his observations on New England men at home, is to be inferred from his small success in representing the peculiarities of their speech. The caricature is not absolutely a bad one, but not nearly as good as a man of so much shrewdness, had he travelled into New England, might be expected to produce. For instance, "I reckon," is not Yankee, but Virginian cacology. "Stranger," as a form of address to a person whose name one does not know, belongs not to the Eastern, but to the Western dialect. Get along, when used at all, is used for, "to proceed," and never in the sense intended to be attached to it in the following sentence; "I calculate I'll make a pretty tolerble considerable speck on what I 've got along." Mighty, we have supposed from Colonel Crockett's works, to be a Tennessean, certainly it is not a New England superlative. And "doos you," wherever else it may prevail, we will answer for it, was never heard between the Hudson and the St. Croix.

But wherever and however his studies into the New England character were prosecuted, the result is such as the following specimen may indicate. The work is in form an autobiography. The writer and hero, having occasion to visit the lower regions, falls in, on the way thither, with "the ghost of a Yankee pedlar, who was journeying to the other world with his cart of tin ware and other notions." This personage directly joined him, "and showed himself to be fully as impudent and inquisitive as if he were still alive." The passage of the party over the Styx is delayed half an hour, while the pedlar higgles with Charon for a reduction of the ferriage from twelve cents and a half, the usual fee, to ten cents ;" and again, by his plunging into the river after a "cooter," from one of whose bones, when caught, he proceeds to make, with his penknife, an article, which he offers for sale, as "an elegant tortoise-shell comb." Arrived before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus, they found him "seated with a great number of large account books before him."

"Virgil Hoskins is your name, is it?' said he. Here it is, among the H's, page 49,358. Ah, Virgil! there's a terribly long account against you. Let's see a few of the charges.' (Reads.)

"VIRGIL HOSKINS,

DR.

"June 27, 18—, To selling in the course of one peddling expedition, 497,368 wooden nutmegs, 281,532 Spanish cigars made of oak leaves, and 647 wooden clocks.

"What do you say to that charge, Hoskins?

"Hoskins. Why, that was counted in our place about the greatest peddlin trip that ever was made over the Potomac.

"Rhadamanthus reads: June 29, 18-, To stealing an old grindstone, smearing it over with butter, and then selling it as a cheese.

"Hoskins, in great surprise. Jimminny! surely you wouldn't punish a man for that, would you?

"Rhadamanthus reads: December 13, 1780, To making a counterfeit dollar of pewter, when you were six years old, and cheating your own father with it.

"Hoskins. Daddy was mighty glad when he found it out. He said it showed I had a genus.

"Rhadamanthus reads: July 2, 18—, To taking a worn-out pair of shoes, which you found in the road, and selling them to a pious old lady, as being actually the shoes of Saint Paul. Hoskins, with exultation: I made four dollars and twelve and a half cents by that.

"Rhadamanthus reads:

July 2, 18, To taking an empty old watch-case, putting a live cricket into it, and then selling it as a patent lever in full motion. "Hoskins. He, he, he,ever played in all my life.

that was one of the 'cutest tricks I

"Rhadamanthus. It would occupy me a week, Hoskins, to go through all the charges against you. These few are sufficient. I really am getting entirely out of patience with New England, for it gives me more trouble than all the rest of the world put together. You are sentenced to be thrown into a lake of boiling molasses, where nearly all your countrymen already are, with that same old grindstone tied to your neck, and to remain there for ever.". - pp. 42, 43.

Here is the ideal of the New England character, as exhibited in different aspects in different parts of the story. We have no intention to represent the volume as a malignant libel upon the character of this portion of the country. It is not so. It is simply an easy jeu d'esprit, thrown off in the wantonness of "a few long days of summer leisure," which the author says he "knew not how to employ better." Whatever there is of bilious temperament apparent on his part, is vented as much on other characters produced in the nar