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to the one, but a higher intellectual advancement than they bad yet attained was necessary for the other.

Thus it was, that from the very dawn of their independence, the Americans became an imitative people. Having no examples of native excellence to appeal to, they at once adopted the models of another nation, without reflecting that these, however excellent, might be ill adapted for imitation in a state of manners and society altogether different. Surrounded by all the elements of originality in the world of untried images and associations with which they were familiar, they renounced them all, to become the imitators of a people who to this hour have denied them even the praise of skilful imitation.

The world affords no instance of a people, among whom an eloquence, merely imitative, ever was successful. It is indeed quite evident, that eloquence, to be effective, must be expressly accommodated, not only to the general condition of society, but to the habits, intelligence, sympathies, prejudices, and peculiarities of the audience. The images which appeal most forcibly to the feelings of one people,

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will fail utterly of effect when addressed to another, living under a different climate, accustomed to a different aspect of external nature, and of habits and partialities generated under a different modification of social intercourse.

The first great objection, therefore, to American eloquence, is, that it is not American. When a traveller visits the United States, and sees the form and pressure of society; a population thinly scattered through regions of interminable forest; appearances of nature widely varying from those of European countries; the entire absence of luxury; the prevailing plainness of manner and expression; the general deficiency of literary acquirement; the thousand visible consequences of democratic institutions; he is naturally led to expect that the eloquence of such a people would be marked at least by images and associations peculiar to their own circumstances and condition. This anticipation would no doubt be strengthened by the first aspect of Congress. He would find in the Capitol of Washington two assemblies of plain farmers and attorneys; men who exhibited in their whole deportment an evident aversion

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from the graces and elegancies of polished society; of coarse appetites, and coarser manners; and betraying a practical contempt for all knowledge not palpably convertible to the purposes of pecuniary profit. The impression might not be pleasing, but he would congratulate himself on having at least escaped from the dull regions of commonplace, and calculate on being spared the penalty of listening to the monotonous iteration of hackneyed metaphor, and the crambe recocta of British oratory, hashed up for purposes of public benefit or private vanity, by a Washington cuisinier.

In all this he would be most wretchedly deceived. He might patiently sit out speeches of a week's duration, without detecting even the vestige of originality, either of thought or illustration. But he would be dosed ad nauseam with trite quotations from Latin authors, apparently extracted for the nonce from the schoolbooks of some neighbouring academy for young gentlemen. He would hear abundance of truisms, both moral and political, emphatically asserted and most illogically proved; he would learn the opinions of each successive orator on all matters

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of national policy, foreign and domestic. He would be gorged to the very throat with the most extravagant praises of the American government, and the character and intelligence of the people. He would listen to the interminable drivellings of an insatiable vanity, which, like the sisters of the horseleech, is for ever crying, "Give, give." He would follow the orator into the seventh heaven of bombast, and descend with him into the lowest regions of the bathos. Still in all this he would detect nothing but a miserably executed parody—a sort of bungling plagiarism—an imitation of inapplicable models—a mimicry like that of the clown in a pantomime, all ridicule and burlesque. In American oratory, in short, he will find nothing vernacular but the vulgarities, and the entire disregard of those proprieties, on the scrupulous observance of which the effect even of the highest eloquence must necessarily depend.

In Congress, the number of men who have received -what even in the United States is called-a classical education, is extremely small, and of these the proportion who still retain sufficient scholarship to

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find pleasure in allusion to the words of the great writers of antiquity, is yet smaller. The great majority are utterly and recklessly ignorant of the learned languages, and the whole literature embodied in them; and it is evident that, with such an audience, any appeal to classical authority is mere waste of breath in the one party, and of patience in the other. It may appear strange, under such circumstances, but I have no doubt of the fact, that in the course of a session, more Latin-such as it is-is quoted in the House of Representatives, than in both Houses of the British Parliament. Indeed it is ludicrous enough to observe the solicitude of men, evidently illiterate, to trick out their speeches with such hackneyed extracts from classical authors, as they may have picked up in the course of a superficial reading. Thus, if a member be attacked, he will probably assure the House, not in plain English, that the charge of his opponent is weak, and without foundation, but in Latin, that it is "telum imbelle et sine ictu." Should he find occasion to profess philanthropy, the chances are that the words of Terence, "Homo sum, humani nihil," &c. will be mispronounced