alarmed at the consequences likely to result from its destruction. This alarm, however, soon gave way to his ideal terrors of spiritual agents; and at length his frame sunk under the agony of those emotions, which rose in his soul, as the shades of night began to thicken, and the pale beams of the moon shot, at unfrequent intervals, through the clouds that obscured her course in the heavens, momentary, trembling streaks of light through the thick, painted glass of the Gothic windows of the apartment; those momentary, trembling streaks of light, which only served to cast a deeper, broader gloom over all the objects around, and to aug. ment the misery of Edward's heart.

At ten o'clock at night, after eight hours durance in this dun geon, Edward was awakened from his trance, by the tutor shaking him roughly by the throat, and telling him that it was time to go to bed. The child's pale, wan cheek, and haggard aspect, made no impression on his preceptor, whe menaced a repetition of this imprisonment, on the next, and every succeeding day, till Edward's father should come down into the country. The next morning, as soon as he rose, Edward went to his tutor, and told him how much he had suffered in the library, and, that he had dashed his hand through and destroyed the great picture, which stood on the floor, without a frame. At this the parson's wrath knew no bounds, and he declared, that he would lock up Edward in the library night and day till his father came.-Edward-You may kill me, if you please, but you shall not carry me alive to that horrid place; or, if depend upon it, that I will destroy every picture and every book in the room, altho' I am certain of perishing on the scaffold for it.

you do,

This menace saved Edward from a second introduction to the dungeon; and the tutor continued growling and grumbling about the globes and the picture, every day and every hour, till Edward, now thoroughly familiarized to the ecclesiastic's drowsy hum, cared no more about them, than he did for a shattered kite or a broken peg-top. At length, Edward's father arrived; and the tutor immediately entertained him with an account, that the boy had wilfully destroyed the globes, and, when shut up in the library, had, out of mere spite and malice, torn the great picture to pieces, and had, ever since, openly insulted his tutor, and set him at nought. -Give me leave, Sir, to hear what the boy has to say, if you please, said Edward's father; and forthwith sent for his son. When Edward entered the room, he flew directly into his father's arms, his eyes filled with tears, his heart beating with tumultuous throbs, and his tongue utterly unable to give utterance to his fo

ings. His father embraced him tenderly, and then said, Edward, tell me what you have done to the globes, and to the great picture in the library.

Edward I wished to see what was under the green covers in your study; and in endeavouring to accomplish this, I pulled down the shelf, and broke the globes to pieces; for this my tutor locked me up in the library, where I was so terrified, as the evening grew dark, with the apprehension of spirits and ghosts, that in the midst of my agony I dashed my hand through the picture. His father replied-Your climbing up to discover what was under the green covers in my study, was wrong; you should have asked some one to tell you what those covers concealed; but the mischief, which you did, falls upon your own head; for I bought those globes on purpose for you, and intended to present them to you on your next birth-day, when you was to have begun to study their use and import; you see, therefore, the great loss which you have sustained by your impetuous indiscretion. As for the picture, which you have destroyed, I do not blame you for that act; I could, never, myself, look upon the horrid expression of that assassin's countenance without shuddering. I am sorry that you was locked up in that gloomy apartment, the library; as it is, you have suffered more than enough already, and we will bury the whole in oblivion.

Edward's father again embraced his child, and, from that moment, bound ties round his heart, infinitely stronger than all the bonds of mere consanguinity, even the ties of affection, of gratitude, of honour, of esteem, of respect, of all but adoration, which mixed in each and in every pulsation of his heart, till that heart ceased to beat.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

THIRD SECTION.

AMERICAN LITERATURE REVIEWED.

THE GLEANER. A miscellaneous production, in three volumes 12mo. By Constantia. Boston: by Thomas & Andrews, Faust's Statue, 45 Newbury-Street. 1798.

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T must create, at least, a momentary surprise in the mind of the reader to see the review of a book, which has been published, now, nearly nine years, and which, long ere this, should either have forced itself into public notoriety, by its own merit, or have sunken, by the weight of its own intrinsic absurdity, into the vault of all the Capulets.

To remove such an objection, we shall briefly state the reasons, which induced us to animadvert upon the Gleaner.-First, it is written by a lady; and it has long been one of the first wishes of our hearts that the female intellect might be encouraged, in order that the companions of our softer hours might cease to be the mere play-things of our moments of idle relaxation, might rise from the degradation of only administering to the animal appetite of man, creation's haughty lord, to that rank in the scale of civilized society, which their capacities and their virtues so amply entitle them to claim :-Secondly, the fair Constantia professes to have written the Gleaner for the purpose of upholding and of supporting the cause of religion and of morality.

The book, now under review, is made up of essays, a most convenient form for the easy and the pleasant conveyance of instruction and delight to the reader. When Addison, in conjunction with some of his literary friends, began to publish the first numbers of the Spectator, the British nation presented a spectacle of the most barbarous and deplorable ignorance, among the higher and the middle orders of the people. Scarcely any gentleman, except among the three learned professions of divinity, law, and physic, and, here and there, a merchant, whose knowledge seldom or ever travelled beyond the purlieus of tare and trett, or soared to a higher flight of information than to bear engraven upon the tablets of his understanding the price of tea and of tallow, could write, or even spell their own names; and as for the ladies, they were absolutely forbidden to learn to read or to write, lest they should peruse, or indite love-lorn ditties from or to some designing swain,

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and, by a clandestine marriage, pollute the blood, or frustrate the prudential calculations of their parents and guardians.

The labours of Addison, and the labours of those British essayists, who have followed Addison, have, perhaps, done more towards diffusing a taste for intellectual improvement,and all its concomitant benefits, among the people of Britain, than any other species of literary composition. Full seven tenths of every community must be so occupied in providing for the day that is passing over them, or in accelerating the progress of their actual employments, that they cannot find leisure or opportunity to study either extensively or profoundly. And shall the ample page of knowledge, rich with the spoils of time, never be unrolled to any of these numerous bands of society; shall they all stagger on, from the cradle to the grave, shrouded in the thick mists of ignorance; shall they all sink below even the level of the bestial herd?

No; to all these the moralist and the philosopher extends the hand of kindness, and by transfusing the light of his midnight lucubrations into the pages of his periodical essays, brings home the duties and the decencies of life, the more refined pleasures of taste and of intellect, to the business and the bosoms of those men, whose footsteps tread not among the bowers, where elegance vies with splendour, and where science bids her children rise to more exalted sensations, than those which await the sons of ignorance and sloth.

Let us now see how the Gleaner has fulfilled the high and the responsible duties of the Essayist, let us see what of force or of elegance she has added to the language, what of ardour and of confidence to the virtue of America? In the dedication to John Adams, L. L. D. President of the United States of America, the second paragraph is verbatim, as follows:

"That benignity and dignified affability, which is, perhaps, inseparable from a truly noble mind, may be compared to the lucid veil, that, thrown around the orient beam, accommodates to our imbecile gaze those splendours, which might otherwise dazzle and confound; we trace with enkindling ardour the mildly attempered radiance, we learn to appreciate its worth, and spontaneously we bless its genial path."

To comment upon such an assemblage of words, which have not even the semblance of the shadow of meaning, which are free from the imputation of any thing bearing the most distant similitude to sense, would, indeed, be a labour vain and ineffectual. If I were asked my opinion of this combination of harmless terms,

I should reply in the following words;-a youth, one day, took upon himself to pester a lively girl with a most abundant effusion of bombastical expressions of his awkward love, and his uncouth attachment; he spoke of Cupid, and of Venus, and of darts and flames, and piercing eyes, and broken hearts, and I know not what besides of skimble skamble stuff, so as to shake the fair one from her patience, and she replied,-All this, Sir, may be very sublime, for aught I know, but, indeed, it is very ridiculous.

If the ci-devant president Adams has been obliged to wade through this dedication, I do, indeed, pity him; but if he really permitted, (as is asserted in the paragraph immediately succeeding that which I have quoted) the Gleaner to write such a dedication at him, he deserves, and he will doubtless receive, from all those who revere the cause of sound literature, sentiments far different from those of compassion. It should never be forgotten, that he, who sanctions by his encouragement a rebellion against all sense and taste in literary productions is, at least, as culpable as the immediate fabricator of the trash encouraged.

But although the Gleaner has bespattered the worthy ex-president all over with the spray of her dedication, yet as she comes forward in defence of religion and morality, a little, nay a great deal of nonsense might be pardoned or over-looked. To which I reply, that nonsense never did, and never can assist any cause; it would be as easy to lift the earth with a fulcrum of ether as to keep alive any cause, which had only nonsense for its support.-But waving this argument in favour of nonsense, let us examine by what means Constantia performs her great services to the cause of morality and religion.

In her Essay on Education the Gleaner discovers that Solomon was a booby for recommending the use of the rod in rearing child. After so many successive generations have paid the tribute of their homage to the superior wisdom of Israel's king, it is rather too late now even for a fair lady of Boston to step forward and tell us, that in the magnitude of her sagacity, and in the profundity of her penetration, she has discovered that Solomon was deficient in understanding.-This-(what shall I call it?)—of the Gleaner, reminds me of Dr. Priestley's assertion, in one of his attempts to fritter away Christianity, and pare it down to a convenient size for the accommodation of his friends in the French National Convention, that Jesus Christ was a very good sort of a man, but no philosopher-And M. Villers, in a discourse, which he read, about two or three years since, before the National Institute in Paris, says that Christ made his plan of religion too simple, he not