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 orcase 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 latitudo, all ruled by the English viceroy Sir George Campbell, governor of New Scotland.

This capital is called IIalifax, and the governor has nothing to do. Happy sovereign. Under his windows, an abandoned cemetery extends its vast silence, and the new writer preterds 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 occan, 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 pecple, 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 truc object of veritable philology. Few think so. They edit Celtic dictionaries, but cannot stoop to pick

up the words formed or deformed every day under their eyes. No Englishman, whom I know of, dreams of collecting in a dictionary all the dialects of his language, which are now patois, or brogues, and cannot claim the title of separato tongues

-the dialects of Cumberland, Lancashire, Sommersetshire, the Scottish, Irish, Yankee, and even the strange jargon of the Ilindoostance half-breeds. Mr. Haliburton's book, "The Clockmaker," gives at a glance all the American elegancies. I have said, it is a remarkably good book.

It is not a romance, history, drama, philosophic treatise, voyage, story, or declamation; this patois-book, written by a colonist of Halifax, full of adages à la Sancho Panza, and of stories worthy of Bonaventure Desperiers, is simply an admirable book. The author explains the sketchy, existing civilization of the United States; the ricketty, unhealthy civilization of Canada, and the profound torpor of the neighboring British provinces. He enters into the secret details of private life, and exhibits all which English travellers havo left in shadow. Nearly all travels in the United States are unsatisfactory. An English tory, accustomed to be surrounded by veneration and respect; a fashionable actress, living on the lucrative enthusiasm of the republicans; a romantic female economist, who regrets that she does not find in America, the reality of her illusions, these are guides little worthy of esteem or trust; their observation is but skin-deep : they give us but sterile epigrams and frivolous satire, instead of any insight into a civilization uuexampled in history, into a society, scarcely formed, yet of incontestable greatness.

It cannot be too often repeated to Europe and her preoccupied statesmen, that there are two nations and two territorics meriting the closest attention; they are mistresses of unknown power; the future is theirs; the nations are young,

the countries poorly peopled, but they have much to do, and they grow rapidly: I speak of America and of Russia.

Both grow too rapidly to understand the secret of their increase both are too simple to be believed, when they speak of themselves.

The painters, orators, sculptors, poets and historians of the United States, keeping their eyes fixed upon Europe, and oppressed by her mass of glorious memories, lose the courage necessary to draw from a living source personal ideas and fresh sentiment. The engraver's art is cold; the painter's disposition methodical; the preacher's cloquence recalls the amplifications of college; the parliamentary debates offer an indefinite succession of pompously vulgar harangues. Common-place, that fearful disease of subservient intellect, spreads itself like a grey cloud over a literature yet vague, pale, diffuse, decrepit, even in its èradle. The muse repeats with flat sweetness, Cowper's mournfulness, Wordsworth's morality. The local patriotism of each province, condemns the historian. to a minute and slow exactitude, which forbids him to write anuals, but allows inventories, and devotes six volumes to the genealogy of Pittsburgh or Nashville, and six others to explanatory documents. When, lately, the Quarterly Review, in its sympathy for Brother Jonathan, attempted to laud the talent of American Orators, the editor produced a pleasant contradiction; the lie was constantly given to his predetermined eulogy, by the fragments which he was compelled to cite. There were oceans of words rolling over deserts of ideas; metaphors ruined in torrents, melodramatically thunderous expressions sounded in the solitude and mist; nothing was new, nor simple, nor energetic, nor delicate, hardly an idea of measure and of numbers. Absence of taste would not be astonishing in a nation just trying its wings; but one