manifest their dominion in his conduct. The state of the manners, and that of the mind, are mutually causes and effects. The mind, like the manners, will be distant, rough, forbidding, gross, solitary, and universally disagreeable. A nation, planted in this manner, can scarcely be more than half civilized; and to refinement of character and life must necessarily be a stranger.

In such settlements schools are accordingly few and solitary; and a great multitude of the inhabitants, of both sexes, are unable either to write or read. Churches are still more rare; and the number of persons is usually not small, who have hardly ever been present either at a prayer or a sermon. Unaccustomed to objects of this nature, they neither wish for them, nor know what they are. The preachers whom they hear are, at the same time, very frequently uneducated itinerants, started into the desk by the spirit of propagandism; recommended by nothing but enthusiasm and zeal; unable to teach, and often even to learn. In such a situation, what can the character and manners become, unless such as have been described?

A New-Englander, passing through such settlements, is irresistibly struck with a wide difference between their inhabitants and those of his own country. The scene is changed at once. That intelligence and sociality, that softness and refinement, which prevail among even the plain people of New-England, disappear. That repulsive character, which, as Lord Kaimes has remarked, is an original feature of savage man; intelligence bounded by the farm, the market, and the road which leads to it; affections so rarely moved as scarcely to be capable of being moved at all, unless when roused to resentment; conversation confined to the properties and price of a horse, or the sale of a load of wheat; ignorance, at fifty years of age, of what is familiarly known by every New-England school-boy; wonder, excited by mere common homespun things, because they are novelties; a stagnant indifference about other things, equally common, and of high importance, because they are unknown; an entire vacancy of sentiment, and a sterility of mind, out of which sentiment can never spring; all spread over a great proportion of the inhabitants, make him feel as if he were transported to a distant climate, and as if he were travelling in a foreign country.'vol. ii. p. 300-302.

In this manner it is that the new states have been formed. Looking at the extension of territory, the growth of towns, the rapid increase of inhabitants aided by continual immigration,* the activity of trade where every man is a trader, and the spirit of speculation and adventure with which all are possessed,-nothing can be more hopeful than the prospect, nothing more congenial to the temper of a most ambitious people, who, as we have heard it well observed, having no ancestors to be proud of, place their pride in their posterity. But, on the other hand, there is a government, weak by original constitution, and be

The Americans have judiciously adopted this word from our old writers. It is one which we should not have suffered to become obsolete.

coming necessarily weaker in proportion to the indefinite augmentation of territory over which it extends; there is a lack of religious instruction in most places, an utter destitution of it in many; there is little to exalt the character of the settlers, less to refine and soften them; there is scarcely any other gradation of rank and manners than what arises from the hateful distinction between master and slave, in those new states where it is the pleasure of the sovereign people that slavery should be established. Contemplating this side of the picture, it might well be asked, whether the United States have more to hope or to fear from such prosperity?

But we must conclude. Time will show whether a people can become powerful without an efficient government; whether they can be prosperous without a liberal public expenditure; whether they can advance in arts and literature without a gradation of ranks, and the influence and permanence of hereditary wealth; whether they can be virtuous and happy without a religious establishment.

Whatever may be our anticipations, our wish is, that such measures as may best provide against the existing evils and danger of their society may be adopted in good time; that the Americans may strengthen their general government, not weaken it; consolidate the local ones, not divide them; that they may become more and more enlightened, more and more religious, more and more virtuous, more and more worthy of their parentage; rivalling us in arts, sciences, literature, and whatever conduces to the general good, and that this may be the only rivalry between us.

ART. II.-The Orlando Furioso. Translated into English Verse. By William Stewart Rose. Vol. 1. Post 8vo. THERE is nothing new under the sun!-Geologists discover

the earth we inhabit to have been made out of one which previously existed; and the learned detect, in the writings of the present day, little but the spoils of generations past. Indeed in those inventions which seem to admit of dates, as in mechanical or philosophical discoveries, it is no easy task to follow them to their origin; and were Beckman himself called upon to make out a list from Elysium of worthies,

he would find himself often unable to determine to whom priority of place belonged. Hints are thrown out by one, which another picks up and improves. Principles are established, without any view to distant results; yet by means of them results the most

important

important are obtained. Ages are required to perfect what a moment has commenced, and by the time the work itself becomes useful, it is too late to ascertain its author. But if this be true in the progress of works of art and science, it is more obviously so in those of the imagination. It is wonderful how little pure invention is to be met with in the world, and with what difficulty we trace a popular story to its source. To cry stop thief,' is vain, when the property is transferred from hand to hand in endless succession, with so much expedition and secrecy. The most we can do is to trace a literary theft to Homer; and yet it is contrary to all experience, to suppose that a poem, so complete in its structure, so melodious in its verse, so finished in its language, should have been the first of its kind.

No wonder then that the origin of that delightful species of writing, known by the name of Romance, should be involved in more than common obscurity, when, in addition to the ordinary causes which occasion it, we call to mind that romance was the offspring of an age, of which the records are scanty, and the attainments but very imperfectly known.

Still however it has furnished ingenious men with a very fertile subject of investigation and conjecture-One theory maintains it to be purely of Arabic invention, and to have found its way into France, Italy, and Britain, through the Saracens of Spain. Another, assigning it the same Oriental birth, conveys it into Europe by a different and more recent channel, the Crusades. A third argues that we are indebted for it to the Scalds, or Bards of Norway and Denmark, some of whom, attending Rollo in his expedition to France, introduced it into Normandy. A fourth endeavours to reconcile these conflicting systems, and finds that 'soon after Mithridates had been overthrown by Pompey, a nation of Asiatic Goths, who possessed that region of Asia which is now called Georgia, and is connected on the south with Persia, alarmed at the progressive encroachments of the Roman armies, retired in vast multitudes, under the conduct of their leader Odin or Woden, into the northern parts of Europe, not subject to the Roman government,' and that having settled in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the neighbouring districts, they might thus have imported into Scandinavia those Arabian tales which Rollo perhaps forwarded to France. And lastly, there is a project for tracing it, without the help of that 'figure which the learned call the ambagatory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus,' directly to the writings of the classics.

We confess that we are inclined to look with a favourable eye upon this last hypothesis, and are scarcely in charity with such men as Percy, Warton, and Ellis, when they pass over a theory so obvious, as if utterly unworthy their attention;—more especially

as

as the last admits that the theory, which is most comprehensive and which embraces all the avenues of information to which the writers of the twelfth century can be supposed to have had access, has so far the greatest probability ;'-and doubtless one avenue, nor that an inconsiderable one, must have been the works of the more popular Latin authors;-whilst Warton confesses, in his second Dissertation, that those very Arabians, from whom he would derive romance, possessed, at a very early period, numerous translations from the Greek, not of scientific works only, but even of Pindar and Homer.

The classical system then we are disposed to embrace, not simply because all our prejudices run in favour of the friends of our youth, or that we would ascribe to them, from groundless partiality, an honour to which they have no claim, but because we honestly think that the rough material of romance is to be found in the writings of Greek and Roman story; (especially the latter;) admitting, as we undoubtedly must, that it did not in their hands assume the regular and systematic form which it afterwards exhibited. For instance-the magical operations of Alcina are only counterparts of those of Circe-a cup duly drugged furnishes these ladies alike with the means of transforming men into monsters; and on the other hand, while a ring affords to Ruggiero protection against the arts of his mistress, the herb moly is a specific of precisely the same kind by which Ulysses is enabled to set at naught the enchantments of the daughter of the Sun; nay, the very ring itself, so favourite and powerful an instrument of the writers of romance, could boast very extraordinary properties in more ancient days too-and if, by virtue of wearing it, Bradamante could pass unseen amidst horse and foot, it was no more than Gyges could do by the very same help some hundred years before. Again, what need to recur to Arabian mythology for a hippogriff, which a cavalier might mount, and ride through the air in a reasonable time, if business called him, from France to the Indies, when Bellerophon and Pegasus performed the like journies together of old? and when Bojardo himself actually numbers pegasie' amongst the winged monsters with which Ruggiero in his youth had been taught to contend?* The polished shield, which it was destruction to look upon, is a defensive weapon endowed with the same qualities, and used for the same purposes, as the Gorgon's head; and Perseus and the necromancer, are alike subject to the reproach of stooping to the use of magical arms.' Or-if the hero of romance could expose to the enemy an invulnerable person,

Io dirò che anche Achille fu fatato.' +

*Boj. lib. 3. c. 5.

+ Berni, c. 6. s. 3.

Neither

Neither does the favourite Horse form any distinctive feature of romance, for Bucephalus was upon the same terms with Alexander as Brigliadoro with Orlando, or Bojardo with his cousin. Cæsar too had a charger of the like extraordinary sagacity, impatient of every rider but himself, and after death honoured by his master with a statue in front of the Temple of Venus; * and, not to multiply instances needlessly, Hector himself addresses his steeds by name, as his friends and companions in arms. The circumstances under which Perseus delivered Andromeda from the sea-monster, and released her from chains, manifestly suggest the exposure and rescue of Angelica and Olimpia; and if these latter adventurers wear a somewhat more extravagant and Munchausen air than their prototypes, (which must be allowed,) such exaggerations are sufficiently explained by a reference to the times in which they were told, without travelling to Arabic literature in search of more florid and excursive originals. Merlin's two fountains of Love and Hate are discoverable in those two arrows of mythology,

'Quorum fugat hic, facit alter amorem ;'

Or yet more clearly in the two Fountains of Claudian, whereof one ran honey and the other poison, and in whose mingled stream Cupid dipped his shafts. If a hero of romance ties his horse to a myrtle-bush and finds it inhabited by a gossiping ghost; or, if a magician impregnates a wood with plaintive disembodied spirits, ready to distil gouts of blood' at the fracture of a branch; the marvel is no other than that which a classical hero experienced when Polydorus bled and suffered and spoke from the body of a tree; or than that which a classical god beheld exercised upon the forlorn and fugitive Daphne. Are the writings of romance adorned with the resplendent castles of an Atlante or a Logistilla? The palace of the Sun, glittering with gold and fiery gems, had been already described by the poet of Roman fable, and might have furnished a superb model of ideal architecture to those who should come after him. The Martial games, as Dunlop in his History of Fiction observes, may be fairly reckoned to have supplied the first idea of the tournament, and bards were at hand in both cases to celebrate the fortunes of the day in chivalrous songs; while Hercules and Bacchus are both represented as wandering over the world in quest of adventures, and may be set down (which indeed they are, by romancers themselves) as the legitimate heroes of ancient knight-errantry. Indeed very many stories from classical fables are introduced, without any attempt at concealment ;as that of Narcissus, by Berni;-that of the House of Sleep, Nupt. Honor. et Mariæ.

* Sueton. Cæs.

Vide Pulci, c. 3. 38. Berni. 2, 19.

by