out of three hundred and sixty-five; for the sun enters Aries on the 20th of March, and Libra, not until the 22d of September. The consequence is, that the northern regions enjoy the influence of the solar heat, eight days in every year, longer than those south of the equator. It is hardly necessary to say, that this is accounted for in the elliptical form of the earth's orbit, and that its effect is to render the northern latitudes of the globe, warmer and more habitable than the same southern parallels.

We are not disposed to draw hasty inferences with regard to the designs of Providence, from partial and limited facts, but when we observe the much larger portion of the terrestrial surface, included within the northern hemisphere, this difference of warmth cannot but seem to be a provision, in favour of that part of the globe which is destined for the habitation of mankind, and on which fertility is in consequence more widely diffused; while over those latitudes where earth is wanting, heat is less necessary, and a broad ocean is left open to answer for the purposes of commerce, and as the means of communication between the various collections of the human race. Had this channel been closed to the south, as to the north, by the extension of the continent to the ices which surrounded the poles, how changed would have been the situation of men! how different the intercourse which now exists, and which is destined so much more widely to spread from east to west! how barren and deserted those regions of inhospitable land, that must have occupied the scene of active navigation and profitable enterprise!

It is thus in all the investigations of science, that we are able to trace, not merely in the vast theories resulting from long observation and study, but in the accidental development of facts apparently trifling, the hand of infinite wisdom; to learn, indeed, that all chance is direction which we cannot see; to feel that we are deriving benefits, of which we are ignorant, from causes that are yet unknown; to perceive that discoveries, which we hail with rapture, are only some further views of the great provisions upon which the mighty systems of the universe have been conducted from all previous creation; to expect in this and future states of being, knowledge still more various and extended, powers of acquisition and perception still more vast, and sources of pleasure still more unalloyed; and to indulge not merely from enthusiasm, but from the full conviction of reason, those feelings of gratitude and devotion which are apt, so often, to spring uncalled for from the heart.

ART. IX.-Reise Seiner Hoheit des Herzogs Bernhard zu Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, durch Nord-Amerika, in den Jahren 1825 und 1826. Herausgegeben von Heinrich Luden. Weimar, 1828. Travels of his Highness Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, through North America, in the years 1825 and 1826. Edited by Henry Luden. Weimar, 1828. 2 vols. Royal Octavo, bound in one, xxxii, 317 & 323 pp. With 16 Vignettes, 4 Copperplate Engravings, and 2 Maps.

THE celebrated Zimmerman, whose charming book upon Solitude has never yet, we believe, prevented a young lady from going to a ball, nor gentleman to a dinner party, wrote also a treatise upon national pride, in which he proves in the most conclusive manner that this weakness is common to all the nations that exist, or ever existed on the surface of the earth. One alone he excepts from this general condemnation; a singular association of men, differing in this respect from all the rest of the world. And who, do you suppose, gentle reader, is this favoured people? Why, no other than the author's own dear countrymen, the Swiss, whom he thinks to exculpate from the charge of being proud, by proudly asserting their solitary exemption from this common failing of our nature. He could not more effectually have proved the truth of his general proposition.

We are apt to suspect that all mankind are Swiss in this particular, if we judge from the eagerness with which nations seem disposed to fix this charge upon their neighbours, and to repel it from themselves. At most, when we affect to be very candid, we may admit that we are proud; (and who is not, that has a proper feeling of attachment to his country?) but we call vanity the same feeling in our fellow men, and we exult in the vast difference that there is between our own dignified pride, and the foolish vanity of others. While the Englishman boasts of his glorious roast beef,* he smiles at other not less childish vanities of the neighbouring nations, while the fact is, that these follies are pretty much equalized throughout the world. But nobody likes to acknowledge this truth as applied to themselves, and this is so true, that in the genuine spirit of a Zimmerman, we cannot, as Americans, resist this opportunity of boasting, that however, in other matters, we may be justly taxed with national vanity, or pride, we have not, at least, yet gone so far as to hold up our culinary preparations to the admiration of the universe. The English have their roast beef and their plum-pudding, the French their pâtés de Perigord, the Scotch their haggis, and the

* The glorious roast beef of England.-Hall's Travels to Chili and Peru.

Germans their sour crout; but we, alas! have no dish by means of which we may assert our superiority over the rest of mankind. In this, it must be owned, that we have very much degenerated from the dignity of our British ancestors.

Be that as it may, it is certain that we have not escaped, any more than other nations, the charge of national vanity. Amongst other things, it is said that we are most feelingly alive to what is told of us, and of our manners and customs, by travellers from other countries. But those who tax us in this manner, and we believe they are chiefly inhabitants of the British Islands, ought, in the first place, to look at home. They should remember the terrible outcry that was made in all the British Journals, when a certain General Pillet published a picture of that nation, which, to be sure, was by no means a flattering one, and we will go so far as to admit was a shocking caricature; but not more so, we are sorry to say, than the descriptions which English writers. make of other countries, and particularly of our own. There has always been some nation towards whom the English have felt, or affected to feel, a particular dislike, and who were made the objects of their constant satire. Under Elizabeth, it was the Spaniards; under Cromwell, the Dutch; afterwards, and for a long time, the French; but now they have made a truce with their European neighbours, and the full vial of their gall is poured on their American descendants. There seems to be a fixed design in their travellers and journalists, with a very few exceptions, to revile this nation, and degrade it in the eyes of the world. It is but lately, that the Quarterly Review, a British periodical, held in just estimation for the skill and talent with which it is conducted, warned a distinguished traveller, who, it is understood, intends on his return to England, to publish an account of his journeyings through this country, to take care lest he should be influenced by the attentions which he received from our citizens, to paint every thing that he had seen en couleur de rose. Can we see these things without some degree of feeling? Is this not an indirect threat held out to the gentleman to whom we alluded, in case he should be disposed to speak favourably of us? Is it not as much as telling him that a book on America which should not be strongly spiced with calumny and scandal, would not gratify the taste of a British public? Why is this cry of Tally-ho raised against us? Why are travellers thus spurred and excited by the most prominent Journals of Great Britain, to slander the American nation? and why is our kind treatment of an individual made a subject of alarm, lest he should not furnish his expected quota of abuse? This is as unmanly as it is unjust, and the consequence of it must necessarily be, that whoever shall after this attempt to write about this country, will, unless he possess an extraordinary degree of fortitude,

do it under the influence of fear; for the Quarterly Review is a power, which an author in England can seldom resist with impunity.

Fortunately there is no Quarterly Review at Weimar, and the writer of the work before us being the son of the sovereign of the country, has had no fear before his eyes but that of God and the impartial world. Therefore we have a book in which no attempt is made to hold us up to hatred or to ridicule. The author writes as he feels; he relates or describes all that attracted his observation, at every stage of his long journey through these states; he makes no general reflections, no invidious comparisons between this and other countries; he states facts, as they appeared to him, and leaves the world to decide upon their results. When he is pleased, he frankly avows it, and when he is not, he politely abstains from too strong an expression of his feelings. We could not expect less from a man so elevated by his rank in life, as to be far above the views and motives by which ordinary writers are too often influenced, who are always ready to flatter their countrymen at the expense of others, and who think their own opinions of more importance to the world, than the simple facts which they are expected to relate.

Bernard, Duke of Saxe Weimar Eisenach, the author of these travels, is the youngest son of Charles Augustus, the reigning Grand Duke of that small but interesting German Principality. He is connected by marriage with some of the greatest sovereigns of Europe. In the year 1816, he was married to Ida, sister to the reigning Duke of Saxe Meinungen, by whom he has five children. A sister of that Princess is the wife of the Duke of Clarence, presumptive heir to the crown of Great Britain. His own sister is married to Prince Frederick of Prussia, and his elder brother, presumptive heir to his father's Ducal Crown, has taken to wife Maria Pawlowna, sister to the Emperor Nicholas of Russia. With all these brilliant alliances, however, our author has been obliged, like many other younger brothers of princely families, to seek his fortune in foreign service. He served at first under the Emperor Napoleon, and distinguished himself so much at the age of seventeen, that he obtained the cross of the legion of honour on the field of Wagram. He is now in the service of the king of the Netherlands. A strong thirst after knowledge, induced him to obtain a furlough from his sovereign, during which he paid a visit to these United States.

The Grand Dutchy of Saxe Weimar, is, as we have already said, a small, but highly interesting Principality. It is called the Athens, and was once the literary capital of Germany, when it could boast of having on its exiguous territory such a constellation of men of genius as never were before collected in one spot. There lived and communed together, Goethe, Wieland, Schiller, Her

der, Fichte, Musæus, for some time Kotzebue, Salzmann, and several others of the greatest men of the age. They are all, or nearly all, dead. Goethe, however, still survives, at a very advanced age, and alone sustains the high reputation of the court at which he resides, to which travellers flock from all parts of the European continent. By the protection which he thus granted to the muses, the reigning Duke of Saxe Weimar has acquired an immortal fame; his name will be for ever joined to that of the illustrious men, whom he had the wisdom thus to gather round his throne, while the names of other more powerful princes will be lost in the crowd of sovereigns who have left nothing behind them for which to be remembered by posterity.

In fact the territory of Saxe Weimar is one of the smallest principalities in Europe. It consists of the Dutchy of Weimar proper, situate in the province of Thuringia, in Upper Saxony. It is forty-eight miles in length by twenty-four in breadth; but within its limits is the celebrated University of Jena, which attests the liberal and enlightened spirit of the sovereigns of that country. To this principality is added a part of the old territory of Altenburg, the town of Ilmenau, in the sovereignty of Henneberg, and the town of Eisenbach, from which the family derive part of their title. We do not know whether any or what additions have been made to these dominions among the changes which took place in Germany in the time of the Emperor Napoleon. We have described them as they were before the period of the French revolution. We believe that if any alteration has taken place since, it cannot have been very considerable.

Whatever may be the extent of his father's dominions, our author is still the son of one of the sovereign princes of Europe, crossing the wide ocean in search of knowledge. Not more than half a century ago, it would have been considered an act of madness, and it is believed that at that time the mere attempt would have been punished, at least by confinement in a fortress, if not by something more severe. We know how the great Frederick was treated by his father, for having formed a similar project. He was very fortunate to escape with his life. At the present time, princes are more humanized; they have lost much of their former unsociable disposition, and we should not be at all astonished, if after the lapse of another half century, or perhaps sooner, the United States should be visited by kings and emperors themselves, actuated by the mere desire of acquiring knowledge, by means of which they might be enabled to better the condition of their subjects, and promote the welfare of their dominions. Thus Peter the Great acquired in England and Holland, that knowledge by which he laid the foundation of the present greatness of his empire. He was not, it is true, the less a despot; for that is a fault which no travelling can correct; but, at least, he learned