sions, and ranging among the tombs, I sometimes mistook remote statues for the living.'

Adjoining St. Peters is the Vatican, which next engages the attention of our American traveller. Upon this vast shrine of the arts, twelve millions sterling were, it is said, expended, and from its commencement to the period of its finishing, three hundred years elapsed and thirty-five pontiffs reigned. Several of the master-pieces which it contains are noticed in The Rambles,' but not that which we have always considered as, perhaps, the finest production of the pencil, in expression, interest, and moral grandeur-we mean Raphael's Schools of Athens. Our author has not, however, overlooked in his walks through the palaces of Rome, the Aurora of the Ruspigliosi pavilion, on which, as Forsyth observes in his quaint manner, you gaze till your neck becomes stiff, and your head dizzy. What,' exclaims Eustace, in reference to this fresco of Guido, can equal the grace, the freshness, the celestial glory of that matchless performance; which combines in one splendid, vision all the beautiful features and accompaniments ascribed to the morning by the poets. Homer and Virgil seem to have presided over the work, and Ovid and Tasso given the picture its finishing touches.'

About the living world of Rome very little is told in 'The Rambles.' With respect to its society, the author says, that the multitude of distinguished artists gives an agreeable tone to the conversation of the higher classes, and that they talk of the paintings of Benvenuti, and the works of Canova, with the seriousness that they talk at Paris of the opera and of the rival pretensions of the actresses. To Canova he does homage, in common with all men of taste,* as to the first sculptor of modern times-a supremacy fairly earned by the one hundred and fifty perfect works of his chissel.

The unrivalled importance attached in society at Rome to the labours of the fine arts, is common to all parts of Italy. The stress laid upon music in particular is amusingly exemplified in a phrase of the count de Stendhal speaking of a numerous fashionable assembly held at Milan immediately after a concert of madame Catalani. "The conversation now consisted of nothing but exclamations about the cantatrice; for three quarters of an hour, reckoned by my watch, we had not a finished sentence.' There may be something of caricature in this, but we doubt whether the following paragraph, from the same author, as to Naples, is overstrained. There is nothing in Europe approaching to San Carlo. This theatre, constructed in three hundred days, is a stroke of state policy: it attaches the people to their king more than the best code of laws that could be framed: it has intoxicated all Naples with patriotism. As soon as the name of Ferdinand is mentioned-He has rebuilt San Carlo, they say.'

Writing sonnets for wedding days, and having them printed on pink satin, is, according to the count, the principal occupation of

"Europe-the world-has but one Canova."

Such as the great of yore Canova is to-day.

Childe Harold, Canto ir.

the fashionable Italian wits. How far the sonnet-mania is carried may be understood from Hobhouse's note on the third stanza of the 4th canto of Childe-Harold. Forsyth remarks in one place, that the business of the nation would seem to be poetry, and that in every circle you meet versifiers or improvisatori, who have a satire or a sonnet ready for every occasion.

De Stendhal alleges, that the present inhabitants of Rome apply to themselves without the least ceremony, all that is said of the ancient Romans, and Forsyth gives countenance to the assertion, by stating that they inherit at least one characteristic of their republican ancestors that local pride which Rome has always excited in its natives. Of the sex at Rome, this last writer observes, the Roman ladies are more indebted to nature than to man. Their general style of beauty is large like the Juno, and their forms are perfect as to proportion. Animation of feature, dignity of gesture, a language all music, quickness of remark, a fine tinge of religion are theirs; but they have lost those severer graces and that literate character which once astonished Europe." The count is thrown into ecstacies by their fine eyes, and ejaculates, in this respect all other countries must bend to Italy. At all events, the language of no other country can paint beauty as it is vivified in these exquisite lines

Gli occhi sereni e le stellanti ciglia
La bella bocca angelica, di perle
Piena, e di rose, e di dolci parole.

Mr. Sass states, that the custom of smoking is general throughout Italy; that the lower orders are addicted to theft and extortion; that the Italians add deep cunning to their vivacity; that in travelling you are wretchedly lodged and fed; that your property is always in jeopardy, and your life insecure, except, perhaps, within the Austrian jurisdiction. Drunkenness, however, is almost unknown in Italy, and the cardinal virtue of charity is no where more engagingly and munificently active.*

We had intended to follow Forsyth to the campagna felice, 'to the most curious city, the most singular coast, the most beautiful bay, the most picturesque islands in Europe;' and to Pæstum-where he beheld the most impressive monuments of antiquity on earth;' but we are admonished by the exorbitant number of pages which we have already allotted to this tempting Italy, that it is time for us to think of drawing to a close. We perceive by the preface of 'The Rambles,' that the author proposed at one time to include a general view of the literature of the Peninsula, its present learned institutions and eminent professors. He expresses a hope of being able to execute this design at some future period. He is, we are inclined to believe, well qualified for treating those subjects, and he could easily escape the censures of critics by a more careful revision than he has seen fit, or been able, to give to his actual performance. There is some danger, however, of

* See Eustace on the sixty charitable foundations of the city of Naples.

his being anticipated; for we observe that Mr. Hobhouse has annexed a short memoir on Italian literature to his Historical Illustrations of Lord Byron's 4th Canto, and announces a longer treatise to be published in the course of the current year..

Mr. Hobhouse promises to attempt in this treatise a survey of the revolutions of Italy, from the French invasion in 1796, to the present day. The complexion of his politics does not give assurance of a perfect impartiality, but we are glad that the task is in hands so able. It is very desirable that the influence of the great events of the last twenty years upon the Italian mind and habits should be distinctly marked, and, also, that the causes of their deterioration through the 16th and 17th centuries should be philosophically investigated.

We are not, we confess, sanguine as to the political or moral resurrection of the Italians, though we admit with Lord Byron, that their decay is 'impregnate with divinity,' and that the man must be wilfully blind who is not struck with their extraordinary capacity, the rapidity of their conceptions, their sense of beauty, the fire of their genius, and their longing after independence. * Alfieri and the French revolution may have moved certain classes of them to manly aspirations, and they may be, as the author of the Rambles' asserts, daily becoming more enlightened in the mass; but it must be long before they reach the point of being able 'to break through music and voluptuousness;' to stifle their deeply rooted and almost universal distrust of all public virtue among themselves; to sacrifice their inveterate mutual antipathies, and to unite calmly and cordially for the arduous purpose of expelling and barring out foreign dominion.

ART. II.-Reflections on the Institutions of the Cherokee Indians. from Observations made during a recent Visit to that tribe: In a Letter from a gentleman of Virginia, to Robert Walsh, Jun.June 1st, 1817.

TH

HERE is so little variety among the Indian tribes of North America, in any of the essential qualities which distinguish nations, that however they may differ in language, dress, or apparently in institutions, they may all be considered as one people.

This uniformity is not wonderful, whether we suppose them to derive their origin from a common stock, or not. There are in North America no great natural separations of one section of the country from the rest, which could enable those possessing it, to defend themselves from their warlike neighbours. The stream of emigration, and the torrent of conquest flowed equally in every direction, and destroyed, in succession, the peculiarities of each tribe over which they passed. In Europe, the Alps, the Pyrennees, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, &c. by securing in some degree, at least, the people of one quarter from utter extirpation by military incursions, developed all the peculiarities which are incident to

*Preface to 4th Canto.

climate, and other external circumstances. Besides, the communication between the three great sections of the eastern hemisphere being direct, each contributed to diffuse its own character over portions of the others: and the whole eastern hemisphere affording the combination of more various circumstances which enter into human physiology, it was natural that Europe should produce greater varieties in the human race. Wars which, in America, have exterminated tribes, have, in Europe, only modified nations. Italy has been successively over-run by inhabitants of almost every climate, and of every hue. In Spain the fair complexion of the Caucasian race, has been tinged, not only by the warm sun of Grenada and Andalusia, but by the blood of the Moors.

North America resembles that plain which extends from the Alps and Atlantic shores of Europe to the Oural mountains of Asia: a plain which was occupied by numerous tribes of Indians, equally uncivilized and equally destitute of the means for extending their dominion over a great surface, or of consolidating their conquests, like the Romans, under one permanent empire. No sooner had a period of repose given a casual advancement to one tribe, than that very circumstance excited the cupidity, and, of course, the enmity of neighbouring ones. Hence the whole continent of America, from its primeval settlement, has, probably, exhibited only a series of predatory wars, in which each party sought the extirpation of an enemy, and the occupation of their territory. If civilization began sooner, or advanced farther, in the isthmus between Santiago and Nicaragua, it was probably owing entirely to the circumstance, that this narrow strip of land, girt on two sides by the sea, and protected to the north and south by rivers and mountains, enabled the first occupants to preserve, at least, what was once discovered. The hypothesis which ascribes the comparative civilization of this part of America to the emigration of the Toultees, the Chickimecks, the Nahualtics, the Acolhuces, the Aztees, &c. is liable to many and weighty objections. Civilization in America was either original or imported. It must have been original somewhere: there is then nothing extravagant in supposing it to have been so on our continent. But if it was not original, it was, most probably, imported from Asia: and, according to our ideas of Asiatic navigation, when the transmigration must have happened, the emigrants most probably reached this continent through the communication of Beering's streights, or the Andrean and Fox islands, which, with short intervals, connect the two continents about the fiftieth degree of north latitude. America then was peopled by a race inhabiting a country lying between the fiftieth degree of latitude and the Arctic Circle. Can it be supposed that a people from such a latitude would have passed more than five thousand miles over a fertile and unoccupied, or at least unresisting country, to take up their abode in the tropical region of Sucatan? Before, too, they had any previous intimation of the existence

of such a country? Such a supposition is certainly more chimerical than that the refinement of the Indians inhabiting Mexico, and the isthmus, was, as far as it differed from that of the other tribes of aborigines, original.*

The theory which supposes the progress of the American Indians to have been retarded by incessant wars and conquests, is confirmed by the fact, that almost every section of the continent exhibits proofs of an advancement and power, something, but very little beyond, what are possessed by their present inhabitants. This improvement in the arts was very inconsiderable, because the dominion of any particular tribe was of short duration; and Europe has shown, that conquerors do not always preserve the arts of the conquered, even where the country is not depopulated. It was not until the terror of the Roman name had given security to the city that the arts began to prosper. Rome cannot be said to have enjoyed the liberty of general laws until the reign of Servius Tullius, more than one hundred and seventy years after its foundation. His predecessors were tyrants in authority if they were not in temper— Romulus ut libitum imperitaverat, says Tacitus.

These considerations render it extremely probable, that the aborigines of America, if left to themselves, would not have attained a high degree of civilization in many ages, if, indeed, they ever would; and, consequently, they should mitigate the remorse with which we reflect, that we are the occupiers of their territory: especially since their real population even under the most favourable circumstances never amounted to the five hundredth part of the well peopled portions of Europe. It is difficult to reconcile with the views of an enlarged and philanthropic justice, any right in these barbarians to occupy an immense continent, to the exclusion of so large a portion of the human race. The law which decreed that we should increase and multiply, ordained in the very moment of its enactment, by making the propensity to fulfil it, paramount over moral calculations, that population should spread itself over the earth until resisted by physical obstructions capable of arresting its progress. The Indian tribes oppose no such barriers to the diffusion of the European race, and it must, of course, even if it were in defiance of every moral law, and of every political regulation, spread itself from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. At the same time, we are doubtless under a moral and a religious duty to temper, by all the means in our power, the ravages which this torrent of emigration may occasion: and, since the moral law is not sufficient, even if it exist, to prevent our occupying a territory to which sooner or later we will be impelled by a physical necessity, we are at least obliged, to make not only the existence, but the well-being of the Indians, as far as possible, compatible with our

*The author has not had the good fortune to see any of the European Memoirs which have been written on this subject. He does not know how far he agrees with or differs from others.