benefit of those who are yet to learn, that if America has not done all that might be asked, for the red man or the black, England should be the last to reproach her for the fault.

"The result of this treaty was hardly announced in our public journals, before it was published in England, with some severe animadversions. "The United States,' observed the editor of the London Times, have driven another bargain, and a hard bargain it is, with the miserable Indians. For thirty-five thousand dollars in merchandise, a little more than five thousand pounds in money, as valued by those who furnished it, and an annuity of less than two thousand pounds per annum, Governor Cass, whose diplomatic talents appear on this occasion to have been highly applauded by his countrymen, has prevailed upon the helpless aborigines to surrender five millions of fertile acres, to the westward of the lakes, and equal in surface to about one-fourth of Ireland. Verily, Governor Cass may be said to understand his business.'

"This long-enduring prejudice and habitual propensity to vilify our country and our institutions, seem to be confined to no particular political sect in Great Britain, nor to exempt from its operation any particular measure which, by the power of association, is calculated to call up our original sin of thinking, and acting, and judging for ourselves. With a power to expel the Indians from a territory, which, during all our wars with Great Britain they have only occupied as a convenient avenue to make inroads upon our frontiers, we draw them into ainicable treaty on the restoration of peace, and pay them what they acknowledge an ample equivalent for their title. We introduce into all our treaties provisions for bettering their condition, and enlightening and improving their minds. We furnish them with blacksmiths and teachers, implements of husbandry and stock. We pay them large annuities; we pass laws to protect them from the cupidity of traders; and we employ agents to reside among them, to insure the punctual payment of these annuities, and the faithful observance of these laws, and to attend to their numerous wants, and complaints, and distresses. If it be asked what amount of moneys we pay them, what laws we have enacted to protect their territorial rights and to preserve their morals, let our statute books furnish the reply. If it be asked what injuries we have redressed, what distresses we have relieved, let the monthly, and quarterly, and annual returns of our Indian, and of our subsistence department, be examined. And yet, because we have not done all that an enlightened, virtuous, humane, and opulent nation could, might, or, perhaps, ought to do, all this is to pass as nothing, or, if we would believe the vituperative prints of England, is to be put down to the score of ingratitude, neglect, and national depravity.

"Our English neighbours, in the Canadas, manage these matters in a different way. When they covet a piece of Indian territory, they boldly take possession of it, in the name of the king. There is no consulting with the chiefs and head men of the tribe, no long and expensive treaty, no recognition of their title to the soil which is so unceremoniously taken away, and no annuities paid out with punctilious formality. The thing is cut short by his majesty's command.' This single line has cancelled more Indian title in America, than the government of the United States ever have, or probably ever will purchase, with all their accumulated and accumulating wants and means. But let us, for a moment, cast our eyes

upon Hindostan, and behold the unholy wars, the murders, and abominations. which, like a burning sirocco, have swept away the native institutions of that devoted country, and drenched it with the blood of its simple, unoffending inhabitants. It is truly becoming, in those who have despoiled the rich inheritance of about ninety millions of Hindoos, to reproach us for paying a few scattered bands of hunters for portions of territory, which they do not want, cannot improve, and are willing to part with." pp. 371-973.

The day after the conclusion of the treaty, Governor Cass and Mr. Sibley set out on horseback for Detroit, following the Indian track, which leads across the peninsula of Michigan. Mr. Schoolcraft returned by water, having been absent about three months. With regard to the value and fertility of the soil ceded by the treaty, as well as of that nearer to Detroit, (a part of our territory, to which, at this moment, the tide of emigration has been very properly directed,) much valuable information is contained in a letter, dated Detroit, March 5, 1823, and written by Gen. John R. Williams, a gentleman whose general intelligence, and long residence in the territory, entitle him to the fullest confidence of the inquirer. The tract of country we refer to, lies between latitudes 40° 41′ and 43o. The winters are rather milder than the winters of Connecticut. The prairies afford the finest grazing, and the expense of the transportation of wool to New-York, would be inconsiderable after the completion of the canal.* "I never," says General Williams, "travelled over a more excellent tract of country, than that which lies between this place and lake Michigan. In a south and westerly course from the Huron to the St. Joseph, is, certainly, one of the most beautiful districts, considering its natural state, to be seen, I believe, in America. The country is undulating, the prairies dry and evidently salubrious, interspersed with beautiful lakes of excellent water, and bordered with fine forests, at intervals, resembling oak orchards, and groves, planted by the hand of man. The lakes contain abundance of fish, are of various dimensions, from one to six miles in circumference, with fine outlets, which meander

* The woollen manufacturers, we understand, mean to insist, in the next congress, that the farmers shall give up the duty on foreign wool. We desire to be informed on what principle of equal rights are all the interests of this country to be sacrificed to the clamorpus and insatiable rapacity of this overfed and overfavored class? On what principle of equal justice, are we to have an ESTABLISHED INDUSTRY in a country, which justly deems an ESTABLISHED RELIGION inimical to its liberties? More of this hereafter.

through, and water the surrounding country. The country, generally speaking, may be called open; affording a variety of well-timbered land, and prairies, sometimes interspersed with tall oaks and hickory, and varying in dimension, from one to six miles in circumference; bordered with lofty and dense forests, bountifully supplied with every variety of excellent timber, consisting chiefly of maple, hickory, oak, beach, walnut, white wood, bass wood, &c. It was during the latter part of August when I passed through, and the prairies were literally covered with flowers of the richest hues, from the lily-white to the imperial purple, rich orange, crimson, and pink. The growth of vegetation is remarkably luxuriant, and the streams abound with the purest water, running over gravelly beds, and evidently issuing from springs, from their extraordinary coldness. As an evidence of the fine grazing which the country affords, the person who supplied the people attending the treaty at Chicago with fresh beef, drove about two hundred head from Brownstown to Chicago, a distance of upwards of three hundred miles, in eighteen days, in the month of August; and it is a remarkable fact, that the beef was better when it reached the latter place, that when it left the former."

Mr. Schoolcraft has devoted fifty or sixty pages, to "Observations, interspersed with anecdotes, illustrative of Indian customs and character, and demonstrative of the existence of imaginative tales and oral poetry among the Chippewas." It was our intention to enlarge upon this part of Mr. Schoolcraft's interesting work, but we are obliged to defer what we meant to offer on this subject to some future opportunity, when we propose to take up, in detail, the question of Indian character and tradition, considered as the subjects of poetry or romance.

We cannot part with Mr. Schoolcraft, without acknowledging the pleasure which the perusal of his journal has, on the whole, afforded us; and we cheerfully recommend it to our readers, as a work full of various and useful information. There are, of course, some things to object to; such as want of method in the arrangement, want of simplicity in the narration, and sometimes want of clearness in the scientific details. Among the parvæ macula, we are inclined to enumerate, the falling in with the silly fashion of the day, of beplastering our public men with titles they despise, and that with a contempt which is apt to fall upon the flatterer. To our ears, and we doubt not, to those of these distinguished individuals themselves, James Monroe, Dewitt Clinton, John C. Calhoun, and Lewis Cass, or the surnames, with plain Mr. or the names of their of

fices before them, sound quite as republican, quite as polite, and quite as sonorous, as the more obsequious epithets of 'his honour,' or 'his excellency.' For heaven's sake, let us leave these fooleries to the grown infants of the old world, or at least let our eastern brethren, since they are so disposed, enjoy the exclusive right to all this pretty baby-play.

With regard to the style in which Mr. Schoolcraft's book is written, we are compelled to say, that it is in many respects inferior to that of his previous publications. Not that it has not its merits. It has roundness, fulness, dignity and strength; but it is often very deficient in simplicity, propriety, purity, and grace. Whenever Mr. Schoolcraft is geological, this defect is scarcely visible, because the style of scientific description must of necessity be latinised, and more or less Johnsonian. But in the narrative of his adventures, as well as in the detail of our petty Indian wars, the language of the author is apt to run into a stately polysyllabism, which is every thing but suited to the nature of the subject. Against one peculiarity of Mr. Schoolcraft's manner, we beg leave to file our very particular exceptions; we mean the curious habit he has of taking sudden and starting leaps, from politics to poetry, from rhyme to mineralogy, from trilobites to trochees, and so back again, by the way of stanzas and statistics. All this is, certainly, in very bad taste; and in the next treatise that he gives us on the geology or topography of the western country, we entreat him to forget his Shenstone, his Goldsmith, and his Pope; his Damætas, his Anon. his MSS. and his Old Play. But these are trifling faults; perhaps in the eyes of some, not faults at all; and so favorably do we think of the general merits of this book, that we feel it would have been illiberal to have mentioned these slight blemishes, had we not perceived a growing disposition in our younger writers, to prefer the gay mosaic of metre and matter of fact, to the simplicity and integrity of chaster composition. We conclude as we began, by expressing our acknowledgment of the services which Mr. Schoolcraft has rendered to the scientific world, by declaring our admiration of the honorable enthusiasm which has carried him through the toils and the perils of our wildernesses, and by assuring him, that a continuance of his labors must be followed by all the praise which it is the generous ambition of the man of science to merit and obtain.

ART. X.-Vies des plus celebres et anciens Poetes Provensaux qui ont floury du temps des Comtes de Provence, &c. &c.Par JEHAN DE NOSTRE DAME, Procureur en la cour de Parlement de Provence. A Lyon, pour Alexandre Marsilij,

MDLXXV.

Ir this work has never been reviewed till the present moment, neither the author, nor his friends, nor the literati, have been to blame, for it was published long before the age of reviews or even of gazettes. When the author wrote, therefore, he must have written without the fear of criticism before his eyes. He could not expect that his work would be made the subject of an elaborate article in the ponderous literary journal, nor even of a slighter notice in the newspaper. There was no class of writers in those days, whose function it was to call up the author before them, in the presence of the public, as a schoolmaster summons his pupil with his exercise in hand, to praise him moderately for what he had done, chide him soundly for what he had omitted to do, and read him a long and minute lecture on the faults and mistakes he had committed. There was no one to reprehend his arrangement, his orthography, or his diction-nobody to show him how careless he must have been, when, in his quotations from a Provensal poet, he spells the same word tousiours in one place, and touiour in another in the same page, and when he calls himself Jehan de Nostre Dame in the title page, and Jean de Nostradamus in the dedication-nor to point out that unlucky sentence, in which it is said of one of the Troubadours, that he was in love with a noble lady, to the praise of whom he made many songs, and soon afterwards died," where the reader is left to suppose that the poet is dead, and that his biography is at an end, but on reading a little farther finds that the lady is dead, instead of the poet, who is not only in full life, but actually writing verses with all his might. In short, the work of Nostradamus may well be called, in the words of Sismondi, "destitute of all criticism" (dépourvu de tout critique) in more senses than one; for not only it contains no criticism, but it was never made the subject of any. Even the lowest of those honors which our journals bestow, was never conferred upon it, that of being mentioned in the monthly or quarterly lists of new publications, or of being more pompously announced in the bookseller's advertisements. The lettered post alone, the immense column before the bookseller's shop, plastered with the