soil; that almost every desirable production may be cultivated with complete success; that it has infinite facilities for inland navigation; that, as to the greater part of it, the climate is salu brious, even wonderfully so, considering the heat of its summers and the prodigious surplus of its waters; and that its population, which is in its earliest infancy, is advancing with a rapidity beyond all example. In remarking on the actual proofs of a degree of salubrity which would have been deemed incompatible with such an excess of heated moisture, he advances the theory, with plausible appearances, that the noxious power is neutralized by the prevalence of limestone in the constitution of a great portion of the countries of the upper Mississippi.

Upper Louisiana appears to be very justly a region of more attraction to the people of the United States than the country of the lower Mississippi, especially to agriculturists of moderate property. What are called capitalists, our author says, are tempted by the greater commercial possibilities of the neighbourhood of the Mexican gulf.

The major is very eager to have the country stocked with a population competent to self defence. We say stocked-for he has perfectly acquired the diction of political economists, and everywhere talks of population, and its progress, as if its importance were only relative to the soil, the capacities of which it is adapted to develop, as the French have it. The use and ob ject of the human animal in any given tract of the earth, is to pro mote its productiveness as a farm, and to give rank and consequence to it as a state. Man was made as a thing subservient to farms and states. We should be glad to be helped on to the climax, and be permitted to know what farms and states were made for.

The competency to defence, so urgently necessary to be ac quired in Louisiana, is chiefly against the inroads of the Indians, who have every advantage against a slender population in such a country.

"An immense number of tribes, and some of them powerful, inhabit the extensive regions on the west side of the Mississippi. Their depredations are frequent, and they entertain no fear of punishment; our ordinary force, especially in Upper Louisiana, including the militia, is not sufficient to create any alarm among them. They are extremely bold in their threats; and perhaps one reason why they hold us so cheap is, that they have never been at war with us, and were never beaten by the whites.".

A chapter "of Land Titles" illustrates, in great detail, the regulations observed by the defunct Spanish government of Louisiana in their grants of land to the colonists. All the grants veri

fied to have been made under the former government, were, of course, to be held valid by that of the new proprietor of the country, the United States; but there is no statement of any thing peculiar, as applicable to Louisiana, in the system of the disposal and tenure of lands under this new government. For the present, it seems that much difficulty is made of selling the lands at all; the government, if we understand the major, being afraid the new settlers would so disperse themselves as to be lost, for any value and use in the capacity of subjects, to the parent state, and also incapable of defending themselves. He himself recommends that the assignments of land should, in the first instance, be confined to certain limited tracts, not too remote for an easy communication with the older states; with this restriction he urgently insists that the colonization should be promoted with all possible assistance and haste. He does not say whether the tenures of the future settlers are to be, like those of the possessors of lands under the French and Spanish governments, purely allodia!.

The topic of "Government and Laws" affords a considerable detail, but of no great interest, especially when it is considered that the Spanish and French system will gradually wear away under the new government that has acquired the country. The author seems disposed to a rather favourable estimate of the legis lation; but there is one of the strongest possible presumptions against it in the fact asserted by him, that, "it was the policy of the Spanish government to keep the people in a great measure ignorant of the laws by which they were governed.' A marvellous modesty in the makers of good laws! There must really, however, have been some mysterious and magical principle of efficacy in this legislation, if we are to attribute to it the other fact asserted by the author, that the subjects of it " are apparently the happiest people on earth," notwithstanding that "their moral principles are extremely debauched, and their intercourse with each other is marked by the most corrupt profligacy of manners." The French part of the population of Louisiana is pronounced to be of a much better quality; "they always preserved their integrity, their decency, and their moral principles; though they lost most of their industry, and all their knowledge.' It is something less perfectly miraculous, therefore, that "of all the people on the globe, the French in Louisiana appear to be the happiest." But perhaps, after all, the sum of what we can learn from this sort of dashing sentences is, the utter carelesness, or the want of judg ment, of the writer of them.

The short chapter about "Learning and Religion" might have been still shorter, for it is, in effect, to say there is no such thing in the country. Two schools, patronised by public authority, which carried the pupils no further than the Spanish language,

with writing and common arithmetic, appear to have been, the last time any thing was heard on the subject, the best, and nearly the whole provision for the literature of the capital, New Orleans; and in the settlements at a distance from it, "a person who could read and write was considered as a kind of prodigy." The English Americans are said to be still more deficient than the French. As to religion, a small quantity of the popish ritual, on a Sunday, forms, of course, the christianity of the greater part of the people; and the major justifies and applauds them for being as merry as they can the rest of the day, and for keeping clear of what he calls a "sullen countenance, gloomy subjects, a set form of speech, and a stiff behaviour." He insists they shall by all means have a religion, "a pure and rational religion," he says, "such as is contained in the sublime pages of revelation;" for, "it is of infinite use to mankind in a temporal sense." But not even for the sake of this, the most important of all the benefits of religion, will he consent to have the Indians disturbed, in their devout and laudable adherence to the creed of their forefathers. The book contains a variety of passages in which the writer appears to take considerable credit to himself, as a philosopher, for placing religion in the light in which it is regarded by politicians of the very inferior rank.

There is a desultory entertaining description of the "Character," taken in a general and comprehensive sense, "of the Loui sianians." The representation of the "aborigines" too much resembles that in Guthrie's Grammar, and in Robertson. To Le sure, it forms a striking picture, ready for the use of every succes sive exhibition. But if a man pretends to paint in the sobriety of truth, in the very scene where the reality is displayed, and abzolutely from the life, it is unpardonable to play off again on our imaginations the horrible visions of the long courses of torture and cannibalism. Why cannot we obtain, at last, the mere plain truth as to the degrees and modes of cruelty which captive enemies are condemned to suffer?

There is an ineffectual attempt to revive, under some appearance of probability, the notion of there being a Welsh tribe of Indians somewhere in North America. The major compensates to himself the extreme penury of his religious credence, by believ ing such a proposition as that it would be easy enough for Prince Madoc to make three successful voyages to America before the invention of the compass, and two straight back to Wales.

The most curious and interesting chapter of all (but it admits not of abridgment) is that on the rivers of North America. We will transcribe the description of the confluence of the two noblest

of them, the Missouri and the Mississippi, the former of which, he says, is decidedly the greater river.

"The junction of the two great rivers is in north latitude thirtyeight degrees, and forms an interesting spectacle. The two islands in the mouth of the Missouri oblige him to pay his tribute to what is denominated the father of rivers, through one large, and two small channels. As if he disdained to unite himself with any other river, however respectable and dignified, he precipitates his waters nearly at right angles across the Mississippi, a distance of more than twenty-five hundred yards. The line of separation between them, owing to the difference of their rapidity and colours, is visible from each shore, and still more so from the adjacent hills. The Mississippi, as if astonished at the boldness of an intruder, for a moment recoils and suspends his current, and views in silent majesty the progress of the stranger. They flow nearly twenty miles before their waters mingle with each other."

For an American the composition is tolerable; but the major has a good share of those words and phrases, which his literary countrymen must, however reluctantly, relinquish before they will rank with good writers. The standard is fixed; unless it were possible to consign to oblivion the assemblage of those great authors on whose account the Americans themselves are to feel complacency in their language to the latest ages.

Reflections sur le Suicide. Par Madame la Baronne de StaëlHolstein.

[From the Edinburgh Review.]

THE appearance of a dissertation on a subject which has already produced so many volumes of commonplace, is in itself alarming. But the name of a celebrated writer dispels this natural apprehension, and excites an expectation of more than ordinary originality, which is the only good reason for the reviving a question apparently exhausted. In fact, it may require as vigorous an effort to dig through the rubbish with which mediocrity has been for ages loading a truth, as it did originally to conquer the obstacles which obstructed the first thinkers in their way to it. It must, however, be owned, that the present publication is chiefly remarkable as an event in the life of the author. The persecution of Madame de Staël will be remembered among the distinctions of female talent. It is honourable to the sex, that the independent spirit of one woman of genius has disturbed the triumph of the conqueror of Europe. "All is availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." This almost solitary example of an independence not to be intimi

man.

dated by power, nor subdued by renown, has very strikingly displayed the inferiority of Napoleon's character to his genius. That he is disquieted by the disapprobation of a powerful mind, may indeed be considered as a proof that he has not lost all the sentiments which ought to accompany a great understanding—and that power and flattery have not yet obliterated all sense of what constitutes the true value of praise. But this disquiet has driven him into a persecution so little both in its principle and its means, as to form a characteristical incident in the life of this extraordinary He appears to have curiously sought out the most susceptible parts of her mind, and the most vulnerable points of her situation, that he might inflict his wounds with more ingenious cruelty. He has harassed her by successive mutilations of those works of which he professed to allow the publication. He has banished her from the societies where the terror of his power could not silence the admiration of her genius, and where the blended intercourse of friendship, reason, wit, and eloquence, formed a gratification which a refined enemy would have thought it honourable to spare. Every suffering was through some kind affection, or some elegant taste. Every wound was aimed at a noble part. In her escape from his dominions, she found one of his generals become the actual sove. reign of the country of her husband; and to him she dedicates this little volume, from which we learn, with singular interest, and with scarcely any surprise, that there were moments in which misfortune made her seek the aid of meditation to compose and strengthen her mind, and that she now offers to her fellow sufferers the medicine which has quieted her own agitations.

From the time of Rousseau to the rebound of public opinion caused by the issue of the French revolution, suicide was one of the favourite themes of paradox and declamation; and Madame de Staël, it seems, had formerly written on it, not so much with the temper of philosophy, as with that hostility to received doctrines to which the vivacity and pride of youthful genius are prone. Her mature reason has easily discovered, that the more general judgments of the human race on subjects of moral conduct, disguised as they are under a thousand fantastic forms, obscured by vague, passionate, hyperbolical, and even contradictory forms of expression, debased by the mixture of every species of prejudice and superstition, and distorted into deformity in their passage through narrow and perverted minds, have still some solid foundation in the nature and condition of man. Very little moral truth is to be found in its native state; and it is one of the most important offices of philosophy, to recover it from the impure masses with which it is confounded by the common observer.

It is natural that reparation for youthful paradox should be ainple even to excess. A generous mind deems no atonement suffi