a limited circle, the other spreads over the entire community. There is no escape from it. Lynch law is a familiar specimen of the horrors and injustice that may be committed under this degree of liberty and equality. The most cruel of slave-masters is your rigid republican; and we regret to say, that this even tells unfavourably on the people in general, who have what are deemed to be the most liberal institutions. There was not, in old times, a more cruel slave-master than the free Dutchman, nor a harder one now than the citizen of the United States. The exclamation of the American slave-holder who found that he was to be restrained in acts of unmitigated severity on his blacks, that it was "a precious land of liberty truly, where a man cannot wallop his own niggers as he chooses," was very characteristic. Next to the republicans, for ill-usage of slaves, were the British. The condition of this suffering class was alleviated under French masters, and (among Christians) the Spaniards in modern times, have treated their slaves the best; but none approached the Turks in their humanity and kindness towards them. Thus, in proportion as people were free in their public state, they showed themselves to be tyrannical at home.

Our own persuasion is, that the happiest constitution is that, which, while refusing to admit of excessive power in an individual or exclusive clan, shall be able to repress the brutal excesses of the multitude. While thus holding our own opinions, far be it from us to blame the different convictions of others; and our quarrel with Mr. Squier is not his advocacy of principles opposed to our own, but the condemnation he lavishes on any who dare to entertain opinions that do not exactly chime in with his particular views and sentiments.

The plates which accompany these volumes are well executed; and, if designed by Mr. Squier, prove him to be a better artist than diplomatist, but we must say that the subjects of some of the drawings are unhappily chosen; for instance, those of the Painted Rocks, to which he appears to attach much value, and which are exact fac-similes of the sprawling figures we find occasionally ornamenting our gates, being the production of the "Hours of Idleness" of some truant schoolboy.

Neither can we admire the fancy map which begins the volumes, in which he has pushed back the limits of Costa Rica far beyond her rightful claim, and has included the whole of the Mosquito territory in the state of Nicaragua. Even taking his own view of the claims of the Mosquitos to their own country, we are at a loss to understand why Nicaragua should enjoy the whole of their spoils, nor does he condescend to explain this circumstance.

In concluding our remarks, we cannot but regret that so objectionable a book should have been written by a representative of that great nation which numbers among its citizens such statesmen as Webster and Clay; such historical writers as Prescott and Irving; and such distinguished followers of both pursuits as Stephens, Everett, Rush, and Bancroft. We lament the existence of a blot upon the otherwise brilliant list; although that blot is too small and insignificant to tarnish in any degree the splendour of that constellation of talent which sheds its lustre over the western hemisphere.

THE FIRST OF APRIL.

THERE are some stories which begin near the end, and then go back, like a linendraper's apprentice, to fetch up the entire bundle of incidents. Horace recommends that a poem should begin in the middle. Books of travel often begin at the beginning; and there are writers, and old soldiers, and gossiping country wives, who begin a long time before the beginning. This perplexes me very much. I think I can endure a beginning which begins, like a preface, after the end; there is no harm in modernizing. But to begin before the beginning!!

The first chapter of a book often reminds me of the resining of bows, polishing of flute joints, and shifting of benches and books, which precede the final tuning, which precedes the entrance on the stage, which precedes the symphony, which precedes that part of the concert when the public generally begin to be delighted. Very necessary things, no doubt: but pray let it be done (the preface, I mean, as well as the tuning) in a separate room.

Besides, these "antenatal" beginnings, as Shelley would have called them, are often of a theoretical, transcendental cast of composition. And we are Englishmen, not Germans: fond of the real and practical, rather than of the ideal and unavailable: and so we require statistics. We wish to know when and where everything took place, and to be troubled neither with preliminaries, nor, when the story has once begun, with indefinitenesses. Nay, a writer shall tell us of a curious old castellated mansion, situate in a lovely vale by a rippling brook or a sullen river, in county Blank; and that county Blank shall be enough to engender in the clear-headed and decided John Bull a fit of ineffable contempt, and the book shall be thrown under the table. And the worthy old gentleman has more reason on his side than ingenious novel writers or ing" novel readers are generally aware of; as might be shown by a most satisfactory metaphysical argument, if I were not writing to win the approbation of the same respected John Bull.

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No. If writers will help us to pry into our neighbour's affairs, which is what we all want to do, let us be told the date when, and the precise name of the village or town where, all took place; we shall then believe all that is told us, just as some dozen or more years since, we pinned our faith on the school statistics of Snappleton Twist well, Esq., and, more lately, on the glowing statements of the Peace Congress. But how can we satisfy the metaphysical necessity of belief, if we have to ride through three columns of scenery, weather, and reflections, before we arrive at the narrative, and then are full of wonder and perplexity as to whether we are anywhere or nowhere?

By the bye, why do not reflections come at the end of a tale, as was the custom when we were boys and girls and read Æsop's Fables, and as they do now sometimes at the end of a sermon? We should have all the gold together; and, when our time was short, it would be unnecessary to read the narrative.

In the youthful days of my philosophy, when I believed in the autocratical existence of the ideal man, I asked :-What is the use of the scenery in a story? or of the weather? or of the time of day? May not a hero meet his ladye on a palfrey in the highroad as well as on the

bleak, desolate top of a frowning mountain? on a common-place summer or autumn day of fine weather, as well as in a thunderstorm? at midday as well as in the evening? especially as the first adventure in a story is usually one of the least importance? Years, however, and the sentiments which I have already expressed, and an affectionate indulgence of those foibles of our fellows which come home to us, as those touches of nature which make all mankind kin, have greatly sobered my views; and it is with great complacency that the reader is informed that it was in the summer of 1845, at the village of Wrose, near Bradford, in Yorkshire, on a cheerful sunshiny evening, that what I am about to relate took place. The reader now has data; it is in his facilities for verifying or confuting my statements; and it is the very consciousness of these facilities which will prevent his taking the trouble to do so. The power of doubt is at an end, and the reign of credulity has begun.

It was, then, at Wrose, in the summer of 1845. Wrose is a hamlet consisting of a few houses on a hill. The hill top is bare, but commands very beautiful and somewhat extensive views on all sides save one. It was there that I once gazed on as charming a sunset picture as I have seen anywhere. Beneath me was a winding, cultivated valley, in which the Aire and another piece of water threw up a blood-red reflection of the sun's rays. Around were hills (not pikes but ridges), rising, not with gentle slope, from the vale, and covered with wood, moor, and corn fields. At the back was the glorious sun, sinking in a purple gray haze towards Skipton; and just under him the scooped-out hill side nearly as black as pitch. The corn had just been gathered, and the foreground was bright with the stubble. However this scenery did not affect my story, and so I resume.

It was at Wrose in the summer of 1845. Bear with me, humane reader, in my digressions. A discursive tendency is inseparable from my nature. I love to turn aside and pick up a daisy or buttercup, or to beat down a thistle, or try the depth of a pond by throwing in a stone. And, oh! ye that are more deeply learned in the analysed lucidities of Scotch metaphysick, will not my naturalness be acceptable to the modern student of mind, as an addition to the statistics from which he derives his theories? Have ye not deeply lamented the losses which mental and moral philosophy has sustained in the self-hidings of our numerous writers? I will, then, represent myself fairly as I am, and if in Modern Athens it should be said, that hereby I left in my writings "a possession for all time," my spirit will ride on a cloud with Fingal and Ossian, and indulge its waywardness in wandering over the whole sky. Ah! if the sceptics had been equally candid, would it not be seen that their apparent lucidness resulted from this, that they anatomized the murdered semblance of a verity, whilst Truth herself was too warm-hearted and full of life incomprehensible to find a sympathetic chord in their hearts ? Digression upon digression!

At Wrose, then, in the summer of 1845, a weaver in a blue smockfrock was in converse with a clergyman. Some account of the people mentioned by them will be necessary for the reader's sake. Eccleshill is a village distant some two and a half miles from Bradford, and one and a half from Wrose, and, until the year 1843, rejoiced in the vicinity of a moor named from it. This moor was of an irregular shape, but nowhere more than one mile in length or half a mile in width. Small, however, as it was, it was subdivided into localities. A boggy rise to the south

was called Blake Hill; why, I never inquired. Thither little children would resort in the August, and pry with innocent wonder and eager appetites among the bilberry plants, which grew under the fostering shadows of the closest whins. Merry was the cry of joy, when a berry was found; and thoroughly human the heart of the little being that strung all her prizes on stalks of grass, till she should return home, and give some to her father, some to mother, one to the little thing that could just run uncertainly across the floor, and "now one for baby." In another part of the moor a small plot of ground had been long ago enclosed for a kennel, by one of the owners of Eccleshill Hall, and was known far and wide, when its glories were departed, as "The Dog Kennel." It contained a cottage at the south-west, a pigstye and a donkeyshed at the north-east, both inhabited. Geese also were among the furniture of the kennel; and a solitary, illtempered mongrel cur, renowned both for barking and for biting, was the terror of any village urchin whom curiosity led near to the swamps of the north end of the moor. About the centre, over and above the highroad, were several levels, unbroken by the furze, and almost unbroken by the tracts of the carts which, from time to time, wandered across it, either to shorten a journey or to gather turf. these the rustic cricketers played in an evening; across these greensward levels the footsore villagers were glad to travel, as they returned from a distant scene of work, or set out on Saturday afternoon, in better dress than their ordinary wear, to make their weekly purchases at Bradford. In many spots were shallow ponds, which children contemplated as of mysterious depth, and on the ice of which in winter they were fain to slide.

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Near the north or higher extremity was a well of two troughs, not deep and yet seldom dry, even in the hottest summers-chief of the five wells of the moor. To this at early morn, again at noon, and again about five o'clock in the evening, the village maidens, and sometimes the village youths, came to draw water for all domestic purposes of the dwellers at that end of straggling, skeletoned Eccleshill.

The moor has been transformed into stone-fenced fields; the well and some three thousand square yards near to it are still left to the village; but its glory has departed.

Here I might insert a disquisition by my friend William Smith, on the superiority of stone fences as a work of art to hedges and ditches of whatever kind. It is reserved, however, until the public generally have made better acquaintance with Mr. Price's excellent treatise on the picturesque in landscape gardening. Suffice it to say that, near Bradford, good stone was cheap, and good eyes were rare; and that, except in the time of the rich corn harvests, what was Eccleshill Moor is now a hideous sight.

But, whilst it was a moor, and when lovely Ellen Oddy, the carter's daughter, sought the well daily, the favourite even of the other pretty lasses, who half envied her good looks, and an object of respect even to the boisterous and uncivil young men of Eccleshill (and the young men in those villages in Gilbert's Union, near Bradford, can be selfwilled and uncivil). Ah! then the sun shone; and the days were bright; and the grass was green; and the whins were covered with flowers; and the keen, clear air rang thrice a day with peals of music from the lips of the laughing, open-hearted water-fetchers; and their watercans jingled, and the whole sky smiled joyously into the hearts and faces of the natives, purging all evil passions, and lighting up cheek and eye; and a frown

THE FIRST OF APRIL.

(except in jest), or a troubled look was a thing scarcely known. All was life. The damsels that greeted one another thrice a day on their way to the well had little thought even of gossip: it was not activity, it was not exuberant mirth.

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And there was food for thought in the sight. These girls that came early and late, girls healthy and plump, girls with rosy dimpled cheeks wherein slept a thousand little loves, girls with a kind word, and a merry laugh, and a helping hand (and, now and then, if need were, with a scolding, which was only half meant) for every one they knew; they not make the hearts and homes of their future husbands wealthy and happy? And when, day after day, the doubtfully-dressed wife loitered or hurried down to the well about eleven in the morning, was there any difficulty in assigning the true cause of the untidiness of her cottage, or the squalor of her family, notwithstanding the regular full work of her husband?

Far different appeared the town well at Idle, (a neighbouring village), the few times I have passed it. In a little recess from the steep, primitive, unsmoothed, unsewered main street, open to the view of all passersby, is a diminutive kind of flagged court, with four water-troughs. Go to it in the middle of a summer's afternoon, and you will see three or four water-cans, some full, some empty; and the owners, women of forty years or upwards, in slovenly blue and white dresses, with sleeves turned up, one stooping, perhaps; the others standing with their backs to the wall, and their red brawny arms folded across their breast, gossiping in a droning way for an hour together, and writhing their antiquated faces into violent caricatures of effect, wonder at every incident, however trifling, which is told again for the thirteenth time.

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But at Eccleshill well were groups of maidens; and among them, with merry blue eyes, and her dark brown hair, and round her head the picturesque handkerchief so universal in all those villages, the laughing and yet thoughtful belle of the village, Ellen Oddy. Talk of going to Italy and Greece, to see life in the open air; it is to be seen in the villages of the West Riding, every summer; in some, to be sure, not to very great advantage, but in others to your heart's content. And so in former days it was in Eccleshill. Not a cooling breeze could stir, but it was felt there; not a warm gale could melt, but it stole into the senses and hearts of the inhabitants; and the atmosphere, withal, was keen, pure, and transparent beyond the conception of any one who has not lived among the hills of the north of England, or of Scotland. And the summer sunsets of Airedale and its neighbourhood, all golden and purple, and invigorating and glorious! What wonder, if, under such a sky, Ellen Oddy was blooming, and, in sight of such scenes and of nights not less brilliant, was a partaker ever and anon of earnest thoughts, and carried out of herself into the bosom of the universe, little as she knew of the real nature of her feelings.

It need not, then, be matter of surprize that, notwithstanding a kind and feminine disposition, for a long time she returned no encouraging answer to the many well made, brave, and honest young men, who were glad of the village custom, which allowed them, too, to go to the well and show her all manner of civilities. genuine Englishwoman, is truer than the routine of those whom Dr. Native instinct, which in a Chalmers calls "the pinks of fashionable propriety," taught her how to check anything like rudeness, and how to accept civilities without seem