history, whose heroic age was only yesterday, interests itself in minutia, which have not even the doubtful importance of antiquity, nor the melancholy charm attached to the ruins of the Past.

Farther off than Beverly, Halifax, the capital of New Scotland, a city completely stranger to literature, has become piqued. Sam Slick, the clock-maker, has constituted himself the Addison of this obscure and distant portion of the British Dominions. British America begins to have some pretensions. Three volumes called" Colonial Literature," by G. E. Young, (Halifax,) bears witness to these desires. Mr. Young repeats what Blair, La Harpe, and Batteux have told us too often. Old societies are fertile in philosophy and criticism: one would say that these books which come from afar, were thought, written and printed in some provincial town of England or France. There are some curious facts in William Oliver's "Eight Months in Illinois," an unambitious work from the pen of a workingman in Roxburgshire, printed in Illinois. An emigrant himself, the author gives counsel to those who are to follow him. You see a society just germinating, a country barely inhabited, great inundated prairies, painful cultivation of unploughed soil, and the efforts of a distant colonization, with curious and novel details which interest you vividly.

America republishes for twelve and a half cents the guinea romances of England: the Pictorial Times furnishes engravings, which are used in the sheets which go to the West to sooth the literary appetite of the settlers and the Chippeways. Every State of the Union will soon have its history in ten volumes Washington's letters, very wise but very insignificant, fill six: Franklin has furnished ten: Jefferson and John Quincy Adams will do likewise,

There is then no want of volumes. The globe is covered with them. Soon the forests will be gone, and they will raise pyramids of books which they do not know what to do with. A quaint and clever man, the Philosophe Inconnu, Saint Martin, asks how one shall get rid of all those books which repeat the same idea with a shadow of difference in manner, two thousand years hence. And he proposes in one of his strangest and least known works, the following burlesque and facetious plan. To reduce all existing books to a pap, and with this encyclopedic mixture to nourish childhood and youth; clever men and sages are to be the nurses, and are to receive as reward a grand spoon, according to the grade which each shall attain in this new University-silver spoon, gilt spoon, gold spoon-the highest title to be that of Grand Spoon!

The intellectual and typographical state of the world gives some sense to this bit of facetiousness. The literary pap seems to be hardening in advance. All the world seems to write with the same ink, and in some three hundred years, God knows how glad people will be to gather the few books which have an especial character, and which seem born of a human brain, and not of a material mechanism. Ah, what a dearth there is of originality, humor, poesy!

The present superior men of France, America and England who pretend to great honors, seem afraid to show themselves humorists. Only two or three bold ones dare dream, meditate, not dogmatize eternally, but give themselves up to caprice, wander through the flowers of thought and enjoy liberty. All America has not one humorist. England has only Carlyle. Yet, really serious men, men of powerful thought never refuse themselves the indulgence of caprice, as strong natures risk a too long, too rapid ride beneath the noonday sun, so feared by the sickly and the little.

I have very little faith in excessive gravity and moderation of temperament. I do not trust those ladies so virtuous, always so stiff, who dread a crease in their dresses, and fear to read Moliére at the age of forty.

CHAPTER VIII.

SAMUEL SLICK, THE CLOCKMAKER.

PRIVATE MANNERS OF NORTH AMERICA.

Ir is a piquant curiosity, a book and an excellent book, composed, printed, and published in one of the most unknown. cities of the world, between Cape Breton and the Appalachian mountains, on the shores of the Atlantic, in the lap of a slumbering civilization, discouraged, strangled, deadened by the neighborhood of the United States. Who knows of the existence of a capital composed of five or six large white houses and two or three hundred small red ones, in the fortieth degree of north latitude, all ruled by the English viceroy Sir George Campbell, governor of New Scotland.

This capital is called Halifax, and the governor has nothing to do. Happy sovereign. Under his windows, an abandoned cemetery extends its vast silence, and the new writer pretends that it is the best possible symbol of the governor's administration.

In the midst of the ennui which must exist in a society without life, future, industry, wealth, emulation, by the sound of the murmuring sea, in a climate now vigorous, now burn

ing, lives, not as you might fancy, a lyric poet, a romantic fairy-tale writer, nor yet an epic poet sublime as the ocean, but, what is more rare, a great observer, an original philosopher. If one were to tell me that a work possessing a grain, a single grain, a poor and miserable scruple of originality, had appeared in Java or Madagascar, I think I would have the courage to learn the language of those countries. Here the trouble was less, the harvest more abundant. To enjoy a new pleasure it was only necessary to accustom myself to the Yankee dialect, a sort of patois composed of subtractions and multiplications of syllables, of consonants doubled and vowels elided, and not presenting any formidable difficulties. The Scottish patois, turned by Burns and Ramsey into a poetical language, is an hundred times more difficult.

It was therefore a cheaply purchased vivid enjoyment. I studied Mr. Haliburton's work diligently. In less than a week, I understood all the points of the Yankee dialect; and my labor was amusing and useful even in the philologic point of view.

The philologists who cultivate with exemplary patience, and with an assiduity, rather meritorious than profitable, the garden of Greek, Hebrew, and Persian roots, should occupy themselves with the actual changes taking place in modern tongues. They would discover some of those most interesting facts possible in the science which they cultivate. In lieu of operating upon etymologic corpses, they could exercise themselves upon a living subject. It is a pleasure to note, as they rise, the variations introduced into language by different people, whether these be in the idiom or the pronunciation. We are not uttering hypotheses but realities, not piled up theoretic conjectures, but incontestable facts.

This is the true object of veritable philology. Few think so. They edit Celtic dictionaries, but cannot stoop to pick