maternal eye regard her offspring? Did she exult to behold the bantling, suckle it at her own breast, or hire a wet nurse as bounteous as Cybele? We are sorry to say that she did all she could in an honest underhand way to commit infanticide. She adopted starvation, cold, and neglect, as the means of murder-but the vigorous offspring of the heart and brain of a Paisley weaver outlived the withering treatment—and as it is only in infancy that such creatures ever die—it is now immortal. In September 1808, Wilson journeyed eastward—and during winter he visited the southern states, exhibiting his book, and trying to procure subscribers. He was almost every where discountenanced, or sneered at, or frowned upon; but not

"Chill penury repress'd his noble rage,

Nor froze the genial current of his soul."

The man who had lived so long in his native town on a shilling a-week, that he might raise the means of emigrating to America when without any specific purpose at all was not likely to faint or fail now that he knew he was on the path of glory. "Whatever be the result of these matters," said he, " I shall not sit down with folded hands, whilst any thing can be done to carry my point, since God helps them who help themselves." He more than suspected that he "had been mistaken in publishing a book too good for the country." But though we cannot but smile at the silly boast of Wilson's American biographer, we have no wish to blame America for her behaviour to her adopted citizen. It deserves neither praise nor blame. It was natural, and perhaps inevitable behaviour, in such a personage as she who still rejoices in the strong name -United States. She had something else to do-we need not be more explicit-than to delight in ornithology. It must have appeared to her very absurd, all this bustle about birds.

"I am fixing correspondents," saith Wilson, "in every corner of these northern regions, like so many pickets and outposts; so that scarcely a wren or tit shall be able to pass along from York to Canada but I shall get intelligence of it." The man must have seemed crazy; and then,

dollars were dollars. Literary patronage depends entirely on the state of the currency. But let it depend on what it may, Europe is as bad as America, and worse, in her neglect of genius-and no country in Europe so bad as England. She has given stones to a greater number of men who asked for bread, than any other corn-growing country extant-and yet, with Bloomfield's death at her door but yesterday, she blusters about Scotland's usage of Burns, who has been dead half a century. That poor Scotland should starve her poets to death, is more her misfortune than her sin. For a country "where half-starved spiders feed on half-starved flies," where nothing edible in the shape of animal food is to be found, but sheep'sheads singed in smithies, who but a big blustering Englishman, with his paunch with fat capon lined, and bacon, and all manner of grease, would abuse the noblemen and gentlemen for having allowed the Devil to run away with an Exciseman? It would be easy to burst out in indignant declamation against the ignorance and insensibility of Brother Jonathan. But we eschew such satire, when we think how "he laid his axe thick trees upon"-how he built up cities and how in good time he constructed ships -and such ships! Lord bless ye! did you ever see them sail? Why, "her tackling rich and her apparel high," -a fifteen-hundred tonner works as easy on the swell of the Atlantic, as the Victory or Endeavour on the smooth of Windermere ! No straining-no creaking-no lumbering no lurching; merely murmuring in her majesty, light and bright she goes, as if she were indeed a creature of the element. At such a sight, the idea of a dock-yard never enters your mind-if you have a soul for the sea. You look aloft, and you cannot help blessing "the bit of striped bunting"-and the fair-thank heaven now-the friendly stars. True, that the Shannon smashed the Chesapeake in eleven minutes-boarded and took her in about the time we take to eat an egg; and immortal fame be to Broke, nor forgotten ever the gallant, but on that day luckless, Lawrence! But more formidable frigates—“ if they will allow us to call them so"-never fought or flew -than American single-deckers of the line. What else are they? At long bowls they know right well how to

play-and at close quarters 'tis dangerous to bring an action against them for assault and battery. The truth is, they fought as well as we did-to fight better; we defy the whole race of men or devils. Therefore their frigates took ours and they always will take ours-as long as the present constitution of the British navy endures, and of the present earth, air, fire, and water. When a British forty-four takes an American seventy-four-and that was somewhere about the proportion of the force in all cases where we were captured-we shall be on the lookout for some great change in the nature of things in general, and prepare for emigration to a land from whose bourne no traveller returns, except Hamlet's father, and a few other thin ghosts.

Having thus vindicated the New World to her heart's satisfaction, we may observe, that Wilson, walking with his book under his arm, was justly one of the proudest of men. In New York, the Professor of Columbia College expressed much esteem for his performance." What could they do more? At Hartford, the publisher of a newspaper "expressed the highest admiration of it”— -was not that nuts? Wilson crack'd them, and eat the kernels; but says, with a sly simplicity, "this is a species of currency that will neither purchase plates nor pay the printer; but, nevertheless, it is gratifying to the vanity of an author, when nothing better can be got." Having gone as far east as Portland, in Maine, where he had an opportunity of seeing and conversing with people from the remotest boundaries of the United States, and received much information from them with regard to the birds that frequent those northern regions, he directed from Portland his way across the country, 66 among dreary, savage glens, and mountains covered with pines and hemlocks, amid whose black and half-burnt trunks, and the everlasting rocks and stones, this country grinned horribly'"-till 150 miles brought him to Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, on the Vermont line, where "he paid his addresses to the fathers of literature, and met with a kind and obliging reception. Dr. Wheeloch, the president, made him eat at his table; and the professors vied with each other to oblige him❞—as all professors ought to do towards all good

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men and ornithologists. In Annapolis he passed his book through both houses of the legislature; where, quoth he, "the wise men of Maryland stared and gaped, from bench to bench; but never having heard of such a thing as 120 dollars for a book; the ayes for subscribing were none; and so it was unanimously determined in the negative."

That was shocking; nor can we read it without a cold shudder-without our flesh crawling and creeping over our bones like a congregation of spiders-we who live in a glorious country with a reforming King, in which ten of our most distinguished literary men, somewhat superannuated or so in their learning or genius--wearied and worn out some of them with drudgery that at last becomes dreary and dismal--all virtuous and honourable, elderly or old poor men-were, t'other day, deprived of their paltry pittances of 1007. a year, while feasts were in the act of being gobbled up in Guildhalls, or Gluttony knows where, by persons whose motto is retrenchment, at an expense, and to the tune, of thousands upon thousands. We like to call things by their right names-and this was in cold blood robbery and murder.

Through North Carolina Wilson pursued cheerily his unaccompanied way, and found multitudes of birds that never winter in Pennsylvania. He speaks with a stern and sullen delight-as well he might of its immense solitary pine savannahs-through which the road winds among stagnant ponds, swarming with alligators-dark, sluggish creeks, of the colour of brandy, over which are thrown high wooden bridges without railings, and so crazed and rotten as not only to alarm one's horse, but also the rider, and to make it a matter of thanksgiving to both when they get fairly over, without going through; enormous cypress swamps, which, to a stranger, have a striking, desolate, and ruinous appearance. He desires the friend to whom he is writing to picture to himself a forest of prodigious trees, rising thick as they can grow from a vast, flat, and impenetrable morass, covered for ten feet from the ground with reeds. The leafless limbs of the cypresses are covered with an extraordinary kind of moss from two to ten feet long, in such quantities, that fifty men might conceal them. selves in one tree. Nothing, he says, struck him with

such surprise, as the prospect of several thousand acres of such timber, loaded, as it were, with many million tons of tow waving in the wind. Through solitary pine savannahs and cypress swamps, the enthusiastic ornithologist thus journeyed on, sometimes thirty miles without seeing a hut or a human being; but on one occasion he found himself all at once in not only civilized, but elegant society. "The company consisted of 237 carrion crows (vultur atratus), five or six dogs, and myself, though I only kept order, and left the eating part entirely to others. I sat so near the dead horse, that my feet touched his; and yet, at one time, I counted 39 vultures on and within him, so that hardly an inch of his flesh could be seen for them."

In January, 1810, was published his second volume, and Wilson immediately set out for Pittsburg, on his route to New Orleans. From Pittsburg he descended the Ohio by himself in a skiff-his stock of provisions consisting of some biscuit and cheese, und a bottle of cordial—his gun, trunk, and greatcoat, occupied one end of the boat-he had a small tin to bale her, and to take his beverage from the stream. "I launched into the stream, and soon winded away among the hills that every where enclose this noble river. The weather was warm and serene, and the river like a mirror, except where floating masses of ice spotted its surface, and which required some care to steer clear of; but these, to my surprise, in less than a day's sailing totally disappeared. Far from being concerned at my new situation, I felt my heart expand with joy at the novelties which surrounded me; I listened with pleasure to the whistling of the red bird on the banks as I passed, and contemplated the forest scenery, as it receded, with increas ing delight. The smoke of the numerous sugar camps rising lazily among the mountains, gave great effect to the varying landscape; and the grotesque log cabins that here and there opened from the woods, were diminished into mere dog-houses by the sublimity of the impending moun tains. If you suppose to yourself two parellel ranges of forest covered hills, whose irregular summits are seldom more than three or four miles apart, winding through an immense extent of country, and enclosing a river half a mile wide, which alternately washes the steep declivity on