AMERICAN CLIMATE; MANUFACTURES; BOOK TRADE -DRUG STORES OF PHILADELPHIA; THEATRES; FIREMEN; PUBLIC MEETINGS; STATE OF SOCIETY THERE.

I ARRIVED in Philadelphia at the finest season of the American year. In the middle states the spring is unpleasantly moist; in summer, the heat is, for several weeks, intense, with sudden variations of temperature that will cause the thermometer to fall sometimes thirty degrees in a few hours; while, on the other hand, the winter is almost insufferably cold. That great imitator, Mathews-himself inimitable-used to speak with shuddering recollection of "the Siberian winter" he endured in America; and, I believe, imputed his last fatal illness to its effects. But the American spring is delightful. About the autumnal equinox there is usually a vio lent storm; and to that succeed two short months of the finest weather imaginable-a kind of second summer, superior to the first, and called there, I know not precisely why, "the Indian summer." At its termination, it was my fate to pass, in this city, the severest winter- that of 1835-6-which had visited the country for nearly a century.

The Delaware, a fine navigable river, is about 1200 yards broad at Philadelphia; but it is frozen

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for several months every year. This inconvenience, added to the distance (more than a hundred miles) from the sea, will prevent its ever becoming a considerable port. There are, consequently, very few foreign vessels that trade to it; and there are only four packets, of inferior equipment and accommodation too, that sail to England. Neither is it a considerable seat of any kind of manufacture; but it is of great consequence as a kind of central entrepôt for all productions, native and foreign. The manufacturing population of the United States are almost all confined to New England. In the hands of its busy and enterprising people is the entire cottontrade, the fisheries, and distilleries. In some branches of the cotton-trade they have even become our rivals, as they weave full 200,000,000 yards. of plain goods annually—an amount far exceeding the wants of their own country. Wool is manufac

tured to the value of £5,500,000 per annum, and paper to the amount of £1,200,000. In New England are also manufactured immense quantities of shoes and boots, straw hats (much worn by both sexes), clocks, tin-ware, &c. Our towns of North. ampton and Dunstable find their counterparts in Hartford, and other places there.

To the Philadelphian wholesale warehouses, as into a great réservoir, do most of these commodities flow, and are thence distributed over the more southern and western states. This transmission of products has been much facilitated of late years by improvements in roads, &c., insomuch that the jour

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ney to Pittsburgh, on the great western route, and famous for its coal and iron mines, which used to occupy a fortnight, can now be made in less than three days. Immense sums have been spent by Pennsylvania in internal improvement; and thereby that state has a heavier debt than any in the Union. It is to be observed, that when we hear of the United States having no public debt it is to be understood of the general government only, for each state has a separate debt of its own, and, in some instances, these are not very light either.

In Philadelphia there are, consequently, a prodigious number of storing warehouses; of retail "stores" there are, considering the extent of the place, very few;-in a large proportion of the streets, indeed, there are none at all. [Nota: haberdashers and silk mercers are called "dry goods stores."] Among those last, "book-stores "hold a conspicuous place; for, among the branches of Philadelphian traffic, printed literature must not be forgotten. Reprints of English works— called "pirated editions" by our trade-are so abundant, that most Americans look upon books not of the current year's date as scarce worth the reading. Such works as Bulwer's or Marryat's novels may be had complete, as soon as they appear in England, and well done up in cloth, for 2s. ; or in sheets, printed newspaper fashion, for about 1s. 2d. England they sell at prices varying from £1. ls. to £1. 10s. 6d. All other works of our originating bear a similar price. This state of things, so convenient for them, is too well established to be shaken. Yet

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we heard lately of applications being made by English authors and publishers to Congress to put down American literary piracies, or at least to secure an interest in such reprints. We may save ourselves the trouble: however civilly Congress may seem to entertain such a proposal, it dares do nothing, for the state legislatures would never allow any justice to be done in the matter. In a commercial point of view the gain to the country, by "stealing brooms ready made," is very great. Viewed as a literary question, the result for the Americans is not so favourable. They have as yet little literature of their own; nor, while the present system endures, can they ever have; but, no doubt, they comfort themselves with the idea that they get on very well without. Of poetry, indeed-such as it is-they have no lack. Suppose each of their 1,200 newspapers have ten taggers of lines with ragged endings, we have here 12,000 "poets," who limp after ours "in base awkward imitation." Still, as I have just intimated, the system is not one of clear gain; it must ever belittle (to use an Americanism) their general mind. They are like the bees at whose hive-doors basins full of sugar have been put, who, from being active and cleanly insects, cease to make much honey, and become besides lazy, lousy creatures. The book trade in Belgium is a yet much nearer thorn in the side of French bibliopolists; but vain will be all attempts to remove it, till a national incorporation take place. And yet Mr. Serjeant Talfourd, in bringing up his new law on copyrights, said that something

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might be done for English literary interests, both on the Continent and in America. Propositions may indeed be made, and laws enacted; but the one will be neglected, and the other become a dead letter. A not much better fate will attend the great changes he has in store for securing perpetual copyright to authors and their descendants. If his plans were feasible, which they are not, they would produce injustice. If ever the rule that " partial ill is univer sal good" could be applied with safety, it would be in the looseness of our laws regarding property in published works. Nothing would be more preposterous than granting the perpetual interest he talks of investing in persons who had neither head nor hand in their creation. No, the public will not long allow itself to be at the mercy of such such a privilege might, in many instances, amount to a prohibition of the thing protected. It would never permit the productions of human intellect to run the risk of being abolished in this way. Let authors look to their future fame, as well as to present profit; how would they like to see a race of literary middle men spring up between them and the booksellers, all under contract to disfeature their best works, and present them to the public under other names? By such evasions, on a large scale, would both "empty praise and solid pudding" elude their too eager grasp.

To return to the Philadelphian "stores"-I never saw a place so abundantly supplied with druggists' shops-nor, perhaps as an inevitable consequence, any one so rich in burying-grounds. I have stood