ciety at Dartmouth College, August 19th, 1824, by Nathaniel H. Carter. Published by request. 1 vol. 8vo. Clayton & Van Norden. An Oration, pronounced before the Society of Phi Beta Kappa, at Dartmouth College, August 19th, 1824, by Samuel L. Knapp. Published by request of the society. 8vo. Boston, Commercial Gazette Press. Escalala; an American tale. By Samuel B. Beach. 1 vol. 12mo. Wilham Williams, Utica. The New-York Monthly Chronicle of Medicine and Surgery, No. 6. E. Bliss & E. White. Theatrical Register, Nos. 11, 12, 13 and 14. E. M. Murden. Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, No. 30, for December, 1824. The Port Folio, For November, 1824. No. 271. H. Hall. Philadelphia. A selection of Sepulchral Curiosities, with a biographical sketch on humau longevity: containing the most sublime, singular, and authentic epitaphs that ever were before collected. 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And to the tales, novels, sketches and poems, by no means contemptible in point of numbers, which have been produced from the obviously inviting capabilities of New England story for romance or descrip. tive fiction, and which have only illustrated those capabilities, without fulfilling the expectations their subjects excite, the novel with which this article is headed, must, we think, be added. It is to be regretted that the writers among us, who have the poetical or inventive faculty, seem to be the least industrious antiquarians; while those, on the contrary, who apparently take more pains in compiling their materials from the earlier records, either want the epic and dramatic power, or at least the study and experience by which they may be acquired. There is no question but that the character of the pilgrims, or independents, totally unlike that of the quakers, possessed a high and lofty interest, fit for the purposes of romance. For illustration we might refer to the Calvinist, in Peveril of the Peak; but for the fact, we appeal to the intrinsic evidence which the outline of their history exhibits, in their emigration, with its concomitant circumstances. In the new world, it is true, they had few cavaliers with whom to contend; but they had savages on their wide and naked frontier, and internal dissensions, whenever they were free from the apprehension of external violence. As persecutors of others, they lose the grandeur with which the circumstance of their being the persecuted invested them; and may, perhaps, assume in lieu of it an aspect of meanness and vulgarity, which must ever attach to disputes, contemptible, as we now regard them, in their nature; petty, from the small and accidental advantages of one party; and, from the limited resources of both the oppressors and oppressed, incapable of being clothed with the terrors of power on the one side, and the sublimity of conscientious resistance on the other, These, however, Vol. II. No. X. 32 are but clouds over the surface of that great light, whose enkindling in England was destined to lead there to a glorious revolution; and whose pure and effectual fire, burning here in a clearer atmosphere, has enlightened the world as it was never before enlightened; and now glows with steady splendor, flinging its lustre across the ocean, to cheer the worshipper of freedom in every climate. Many circumstances bordering on the marvellous, preceded the coming of the pilgrims to America, and attended the progress of their settlement. A fiery comet, presaging war and famine and pestilence, had affrighted the aborigines and their diviners, before the arrival of the whites, and prediction pointed to heavy impending calamities. A Frenchman who had been taken captive by one of their hordes, gave utterance at the stake to a prophetic phrenzy, in which he announced to his persecutors the speedy and utter extinction of their power. All these forebodings were soon realized. Civil dissensions and sanguinary wars had thinned their numbers rapidly, when a horrible mortality broke out among them with such resistless fury, that it appeared evident from the bones and skeletons scattered over the vestiges of their former encampments, that the living had been unable to inter the dead. It is said in New England's Memorial, that not more than one in twenty had escaped. While room was thus made for the entrance of the settlers into the dispeopled wilderness, other circumstances seemed to combine, to prevent their ef fecting the object for which they sighed. The difficulties which they experienced have been often told, nor is it our purpose here to recapitulate them. The inscrutable course of Providence, which, for reasons unaccountable to man, permits so often such perplexing and formidable obstacles to obstruct the progress of a work leading to the most glorious results, was never more forcibly illustrated, than in the story of the embarrassments and delays which retarded their first arrival, and nearly crushed their infant colony in its cradle. They might well compare themselves to the Israelites of old, to whom a moderate distance was the journey of a life. A few of them only, more fortunate than their prototypes, lived to see the promised land not only won, but partially reclaimed from savage nature, and putting on the cheerful aspect of civilization and some of them, perchance, with the prophetic spirit of Milton, might have had glimmering visions of a mighty and independent republic, whose territory should. know no bounds but the great waters which divide the globe; and whose people should know no rule, but that of their selfconstituted laws. Soon after the settlement of New-Plymouth, according to tradition, the Indians held a great assemblage of their conjurors, from different tribes, who met in a "dismal swamp," and invoked destruction upon the English intruders, with horrible ceremonies and execrations. If such was the fact, they must have been confirmed in their belief in the virtue of these incantations, by the disasters which followed them. A sterile soil, inclement seasons, want of their accustomed comforts, failure in their expected supplies from England, unusual swarms of destructive insects, and infectious and wasting maladies, by turns and in conjunction, carried off the settlers. In the extremity of their distress, fear of their heathen neighbors was added to their actual misery; and a general plot was discovered, which was to have exterminated the colonists. But whether it arose simply from a dread of the fire-arms and skill of the whites, and their own hereditary feuds and political jealousies, or from a superstitious terror, occasioned by the visitations of disease which they had experienced, and the signs and prophecies which threatened the extinction of their race, a great panic is recorded to have fallen upon these savages, about this time, which prevented a combined attack that must have proved so ruinous. No unity of action showed itself among the hostile tribes, and no general war was waged against the Christians, until they had in some measure established their settlements, and organized their means of defence. We have no time to particularize, or we might advert to the prodigies so gravely collected in the Magnalia; and to the extraordinary signs of the times, both natural and miraculous, as additional subjects for romantic machinery. All these circumstances combine to give a moral grandeur, and a more than common interest, to the period of the early settlement of New-England. They furnish historical poetry with the machinery which it ever craves; and which it has sought to supply, alternately, by the intervention of deities, the dark decrees of fate, and the slow but certain fulfilment of prophecy. They must give to the features of romance an ideal aggrandizement, and high associations, derived from the natives of the settlement, and the consequences to which it was to lead. Though the epoch possesses not that long antiquity which seems essential to the creation of an epic poem, it af fords a substratum for all other species of fiction. The majestic features of nature in the new world, and the stout hearts that came to tame the wilderness and its wilder children, the stern devotion, the unconquerable love of liberty, |