try, where every one, whatever may be his qualities, is sure to be appreciated, and that assurance is extremely agreeable."

"That you can certainly find those who will taste you, and whom you will taste, is one of the circumstances which makes that little island the pleasantest residence on the earth. I am surprised that any one whom weighty circumstances do not compel to live here, should live out of England; or, to speak more generally, that any one who can live in an old country, should live in a new one. Long practice and repeated experiments have caused the whole system of life to be brought to a far higher state of refinement in one land than in the other. There is the same difference that there is between a metropolis and a village life in one is direct and decided, and looking to the substance; in the other it is constrained, embarrassed, and unindependent. America is a great country in the prospect, but not an agreeable one in the present. There is among the English a disposition to enjoy in passing, which the nervous agitation in which Americans live, looking only to the future, puts to flight. The former make the means their end; the latter divide the toil from the pleasure, and look on labour as a cheerless pilgrimage to the happy land beyond. The one live as they go; the other put off living till they are at leisure to do nothing but live. The man of principle who now resides in America, may be regarded as making an honourable self-sacrifice for posterity; but the man of pleasure who lives here is as foolish as the man who, being fond of shade, should, instead of buying a forest, purchase cleared ground and plant it with saplings."

"I should myself prefer to live among the English," said I, "because a natural relationship with them makes. their country to us, like a father's house to a married son. But the people whom I most admire, and even envy, are the French. They have a philosophy against the ills of life, compared with which the philosophy of the schools is nothing,-the philosophy of the blood. They attain, as a nation, what sages and scholars, men

of thought and men of action, of old and now, in other countries, have striven for in vain. I regard them as being in truth the most rational and respectable people in the world; and that they are ridiculed by us is to be ascribed to that queer propensity in human nature to look upon the unhappy man with respect and the joyous man with contempt. The Parisian alone has discovered the important truth that it is not necessary to be happy in order to enjoy oneself. Still it does not follow that an American or an Englishman must be happy in Paris, although that mistake is constantly committed; their pleasure arises from what is within them, not around them."

"The nation which, for political and social advantages I should myself prefer to all others," said Tyler, "is Prussia. It is a nation which lives by law, and there is more freedom in that state than in any country in the world, as there is certainly less in America than in any other. And, indeed, it may be observed of every establishment, whether government, church, or party, that if its form is in one extreme, its spirit is likely to be in the opposite. If its constitution represents authority, its spirit will be liberty, and versa vice: if its profession is liberality, its practice will be exclusion, and the reverse. One reason of this is, that no danger being apprehended from that spirit which the form expressly exorcises, it is not guarded against in use, and soon enters either from the convenience of practice or the natural disposition of men; and for this cause the highborn are the most affable and the low-born the most exclusive: a second reason is, that the administration of all extreme principles tends constantly to correct that wherein the principle is extreme; for, to prevent an extreme principle from becoming obnoxious or impracticable it must be tempered extremely:-a third reason is, that nothing can be practicable which is not, in fact, a mean, and that, consequently, if the form is in one extreme the spirit must be in the other, in order that the two be blended, or the one working through, and being muffled by, the other, may in operation constitute the

required medium. It is farther to be observed of liberty in democratic and despotic governments, that all definite assumptions, (as the royal prerogative in the one,) are limitations; while all indefinite concessions (as the popular privilege in the other) are without defence, because they are without bounds;-that in a monarchy the king has no party on his side, but the people are naturally opposed, or ready to be opposed to him, so that great forbearance must be exercised towards them; while, in a republic, the fact of one's being ruler is proof that a majority are attached to him, and will support him in all he undertakes;-and that the government of a republic is within the natural rule or principle on the subject, and is therefore interpreted widely; while the government of a despotism is an exception against admitted right and reason, and is, in exercise, necessarily expounded strictly. The Romish Church, of which the spirit was despotic, was, in its constitution, purely democratic,-the voluntary principle. The tyrannical government of the Roman Emperors was, in theory, entirely republican. In our time the most practical freedom is in China, Russia, and Prussia; and the vilest despotism on earth may be made of the mob-despotism of America. Much ruinous commotion and many a fatal revolution would have been avoided if people had understood that the spirit of a polity may be diverse from its form, and that not the principle, but the working of it only, is of importance. It is a principle of the English law, that the king has the direct and absolute ownership of all the land in the country, and that the landlord has no more than the mere right of using the soil; the former has absolutum et directum dominium; the latter, only dominium utile.' But as the landlords can do more than use the land, they show their sense in not disturbing themselves about so idle a thing as the ultimate property: the Puritans would have fought about such a thing to the death. Why should a man of sense care that another should assume the right of cutting his head off when he chooses, if he knows that that power will never be exerted unless it is

deserved. When the Gracchan partisan at Rome was asked, 'If Caius Gracchus were to order you to fire the capitol, would you obey him?' he answered wisely, 'Yes; but he would never give such an order.'

That assurance is the principle of protection in an enlightened despotism; and it is enough."

DELIGHTFUL were the thoughts, and delicious the hopes that visited my mind that night as I lay in sleepless happiness. Love is Nature. From ambition, from study, from pleasure and from toil, we start at some time, as from a dream, and deem that such life is madness: to love we turn with the full and unchecked satisfaction with which a chilled bird, long fluttering over the cheerless ground, at last folds its bill under its wing in its own warm nest, for we feel that affection is the home of the spirit. Love is the only mood of the feelings in which the heart bears witness unto itself, that it is rightly and wisely employed; it is the only employment of existence on which we do not look back with regret or condemnation. He who has wandered into the hardness of worldliness, and is arrested in his unprofitable errors by the strong hand of a pure attachment, feels, as he returns to kindliness, something of the satisfaction of a good conscience; for love is the erectness of the mind,-the unlost paradise of the moral life. And there is potential virtue in this sentiment, for it brings with it the airs of a holier clime than mortality