those of the most assiduous scholar, and his disposition is more lively than that of any Indian I ever saw. He understood and felt the advantages the white man had long enjoyed, of having the accumulations of every branch of knowledge, from generation to generation, by means of a written language, while the red man could only commit his thoughts to uncertain tradition. He reasoned correctly, when he urged this to his friends as the cause why the red man had made so few advances in knowledge in comparison with us; and to remedy this was one of his great aims, and one which he has accomplished beyond that of any other man living, or perhaps any other who ever existed in a rude state of nature.

It perhaps may not be known that the government of the United States had a fount of types cast for his alphabet; and that a newspaper, printed partly in the Cherokee language, and partly in the English, has been established at New Echota, and is characterized by decency and good sense; and thus many of the Cherokees are able to read both languages. After putting these remarks to paper, I had the pleasure of seeing the head chief of the Cherokees, who confirmed the statement of See-quah-yah, and added, that he was an Indian of the strictest veracity and sobriety. The western wilderness is not only to blossom like the rose; but there, man has started up, and proved that he has not degenerated since the primitive days of Cecrops, and the romantic ages of wonderful effort and god-like

renown.

LECTURE II.

"They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents."-

THE literature of a nation, thoroughly studied, affords the best criterion, by which may be judged the principles and powers of a people, as well as their rank in the scale of civilization: I mean literature in its extended sense. In endeavouring to execute my task, I shall show those men, and something of their works, who have added to the stock of our learning, from time to time; or those who, by their eloquence or industry in teaching, or by the productions of their pens, have left us an account of the deeds of their predecessors or contemporaries. I shall divide our history into

four periods, of half a century each, for the sake of more easily managing my subject. These periods are, indeed, arbitrary, it may be said, and will not correspond with any remarkable events in politicks or literature. This is very true; but still the division may aid my labours. The skilful painter of a panorama, divides his canvass into portions before he takes up the pencil; but these mechanical arrangements are not seen when the whole surface glows with life and action. A writer may profit by such an example.

All civilized nations have made great exertions, in some period of their history, to discover the origin of their literature, and have rejoiced at every successful effort to trace up and open the fountains, from whence the streams of knowledge have issued to gladden successive generations. With many matters of well authenticated fact, there has been much of fable and conjecture commingled. The farthest East, the birth-place of science and letters, has been overhung with clouds for thirty centuries; and if, for a moment, the eye of genius has sometimes attempted to pierce them, it succeeded for a moment only, and the splendid vision it unfolded was soon covered again with a thicker mantle.

sures.

Even Greece, so dear to us by many sweet associations, can boast of but little accuracy in her early history; she has often substituted for truth, the loveliest visions of fancy, and given the history of her earliest worthies, from golden streams of fiction, rather than from a series of facts. The portraits of heroes and demigods, have generally been shown in the twilight of history, and the glories of their acts have been seen in the faint rays of the sun; while men, mere men, have only been exhibited in the fulness of the perfect day. But in every age there has been a disposition to know much of former times; the persons, dress, minds, manners, and modes of thinking, of those of former days, are sought after by us; and no subject delights us more than a history of their intellectual treaThis remark would have applied with equal effect to our own country, if we had not been under the erroneous impression, that after the most painful search, nothing of value could be found. In the early ages, the curious examined nature in all her virgin loveliness; and her beautiful forms made indelible impressions upon the minds of those enamoured of her charms. We always love to look back and contemplate things as they were. In the philosophical days of Pericles, the Athenians went back with enthusiasm to the days of Homer; and when the Thebans were in a high state of military discipline, and not so much depended upon individual prowess as in the earlier ages of their warfare, and every event was more a matter of calculation, the great objects of their admiration were placed in a more romantick period. They went back to the

Trojan war; when hand to hand, and foot to foot, the sons of gods contended in mortal strife, and fought and bled for the possession of the daughters of men, as well as their own individual fame, governed by such passions as are found in the breasts of mortal men now-a-days. But if fiction be mingled with history, and it is impossible to make the great men of antiquity appear as they really were, still it is delightful to look back upon ages past, and catch a glimpse of them through the medium of their thoughts and opinions, which do not deceive us, if their history does. This we have a right to do; it is no waste of time, no dereliction of duty, and is not injuring any one, if we do not dwell on them so long as to forget the opinions and the subjects of contemplation of the great men of our own times. A man's business, most assuredly, is with those about him; but it is for the interest of himself, and those around him, to draw knowledge and instruction from those who have gone before him. The industrious husbandman who rises early, may, before he enters his fields to labour in the furrow, or to gather in his harvest, indulge himself for a few moments in turning to the rising sun, and in extending his view over the distant landscape to enjoy the sight of the afar-off mountain, the flowing stream, or the lofty spire; or may, if his taste should so direct him, cast a glance at the solemn mansions of the dead, as the rays of light fall on their crumbling tombs. Such contemplations will not enfeeble his hands, or sicken his heart, or make him go reluctantly to his labours; no, it will teach him what he is, and what he has to do, and the necessity of setting about it, that his task may be finished in season, before the night cometh in which no man can work.

The lover of literature, who confines himself to the smallest corner of the vineyard, may, strange as it may seem, refresh himself by viewing the fields where others have toiled through many a weary day. The stores of literature lie before him, and from which he may collect, for use, many lessons of wisdom; for literature, in its proper sense, is the transcript of the head and the heart of man, in the thoughts of the one and the workings of the other, in every age of his existence: all his sufferings, his joys, his hopes, his reasonings, his anticipations, and even his imaginings, belong to the literature of the world; yea, more-the descriptions of his country, of his kindred and friends; of the flowers on which he treads, and of the fountains which flow at his feet, and the dews which fall on his head, and the atmosphere which he breathes, are incorporated in his literature. Thus, thoughts embalmed in words, and principles in thoughts and expressions, make the heir-looms of one generation for another, and to which something is added every day.

It is by literature that we live, as it were, in the ages past as well

as in the present. The well educated man brings into the narrow compass of human life the knowledge of many years, and examines in a single day the events of centuries. He travels back to the wisdom of Egypt, and measures the mind and weighs the science of those who erected the pyramids and etched the hieroglyphics upon them. He dwells upon the literature of the Hebrews, and reads in the books they have left an instructive lesson of human powers and of human virtues and frailties; and enjoys the verses of the poets who sang the glories of that God who delivered them from the yoke of Egypt and the house of bondage; and where can be found pictures of a brighter colouring, or flowers of a sweeter flavour? In these early writings, all the images at once strike the mind as natural, and all the sentiments flow directly from the heart. Their religion, their morals, their whole history, are directly before us, and are monuments of intellect that rise sublimely in the lapse of centuries, a wonder to man.

The Greeks, too, drawing from the same fountains, have left us a literature which cannot be named without emotions of pleasure. Having a language of their own, their literature was seemingly indigenous, however deeply they might have been indebted to the oriental store-houses that had been long open to them. The growth of Greek literature was like all other improvements, progressive; for more than seven hundred years it was so. The Greeks were a peculiar people; their taste was pure, and their discrimination exquisite; and their understandings were the most acute of any people who have ever lived. Their language proves this; for so well was it formed, that science and art are obliged to resort to it at this present day for terms to convey a proper idea of their inventions and improvements. If we could forget their ambition, their volatility, and frequent acts of injustice, the reader might think that he was coursing over fields of light with beings of a superior creation, while he was making himself acquainted with Greek literature. The Greeks multiplied books to inform the judgment and warm the heart, and which gave immortality to themselves and information to all succeeding generations. They created a code of laws for taste and the imagination. What can exceed their permanent fictions? Their mountains still drop with honey, their springs still flow, and will forever flow, with waters impregnated with inspiration; and their groves are still vocal with song. These creations of literary taste are as imperishable as the mind of man; and Attica may be, as it has been for ages, a den of pirates and a place of skulls-yet no matter, a thousand successive pachas could not pluck from our minds the lovely country which literature created, and has preserved. In this form, and under these fascinating guises, the people of that age

found out a method by which they have preserved every shade of thought, and every change of feeling, of which human nature is susceptible. Fiction has given truth some of her ornaments; but they were disposed of so tastefully, that she has been made more beautiful for receiving and wearing them. This is emphatically the triumph of letters; but this triumph was not confined to that region alone; letters assumed their empire not only at Athens, but also at Rome they claimed the wreaths of immortality. The conquests of that mistress of the world have passed away, but her literature never will.

When the Greek was no longer a free man on his own soil, or was an exile in another land, and when the Roman eagles had drooped their wings, literature found her altars among the Arabs; her form in some degree was altered, but her spirit was the same. This people threw all their fierce nature into the pursuits of learning, and surpassed their predecessors not only in works of imagination, but in those connected with the sciences. They spurned the narrow bounds of time and space, and imagined worlds of their own, and peopled them with matchless beings, unshackled by mortal functions, and human laws, and gave them powers and virtues of an angelick nature. But in the midst of these delightful fictions of literature, they forgot not the sciences, but pursued them with a poetick passion. They invented the laws of numbers, and proved the truth of them by the invention itself. They pursued, through the alembick, the visionary doctrines of alchymy to the satisfactory results of chymistry; and, by experiments, brought science from the dreams of avarice to enlighten mankind. That warmth of imagination which saw the times in the stars, found, by the light of the mind which accompanied it, the precise movements of the heavenly bodies; and the delirium of the magician was changed to the devout reverence of the scientifick astronomer. The choicest names in the Arabic language were given to the constellations; and these have been preserved by those who knew but little of their origin. The literature of Spain and Italy was the same in a new form, gaining something at times, but losing much of its ethereal fire in every new transformation. The Gauls and Britains at length came in for their share, and have repaid the world for what they received. The light they borrowed from the East is now reflected back, and the nations of Egypt åre learning the arts of war and peace from those they once instructed. It would require volumes to trace the march of science and letters through every age in its progress round this world of ours.

It may seem to some that I am taking a wide range in these remarks, to get at our literature and science; but there is not a page