move civil and religious disabilities,-they proclaim republican maxims,-they carry into effect new theories and schemes of public economy,-they abolish sinecures and attack abuses-with a promptitude and unanimity that startle the more timid or cautious portion of even enlightened patriots and political philosophers. It is feared that they are yielding to popular clamour, and thus rendering inevitable the extremes of popular revolution and wide desolating anarchy. In Great Britain, this argument is used. "If universal suffrage were adopted in the mode of election, none of the property, or the upper and middle classes of society, would be represented; but the lower classes only; and instead of being the principal organ of public opinion, and of the middle classes, the House of Commons would be that of the lower class, and of popular clamour,-numbers would return whom they pleased the lower class alone would elect that House, whilst the Lords represented the upper class; and the middle class, by far the most powerful body in the state, in point of property or information, would, in fact, not be represented,-would have no voice in the legislature; an anomaly the most absurd that can be imagined." This is plausible at least, when we recur to the distinctions which we have noted between public opinion and popular clamour, their several sources, dependence and effects.

INVENTION AND EXECUTION.

MR. COLDEN has furnished proofs, in his Biographical Memoir of Fulton, that Fulton communicated the project of a steamboat to Lord Stanhope, in the year 1793. It is

not denied in that work that Mr. Fulton availed himself of the hints afforded by the abortive or incomplete experiments of his precursors, American and English.

Their very errors may have suggested to him the means of effecting his object. Scarcely one of the illustrious men who have the credit of noble discoveries, or improvements, in physics or in morals, but enjoyed this negative kind of aid, or the positive advantage of seminal ideas and particular schemes. Sir Isaac Newton was indebted to the experiments and observations of Kepler, and to the discoveries of Grimaldi; Galileo had seen the telescope of Metius: Watt profited by the labours of Newcomen: Dr. Jenner was not the first who imagined, or suggested, or tried, the prophylactic virtue of the vaccine. There is a striking analogy, in fact, between the cases of Jenner and Fulton :-the glory of vaccination is not more justly due to the one, than that of steam-navigation to the other. The question is not, who first proposed to connect steam with navigation; but who first and completely succeeded in so doing, and enabled others to succeed. The world will never consent to exalt the genius and merits of him who merely throws out a loose hint, or stops short at a diagram, or finishes with an abortive experiment, over those of the sanguine enterpriser who seizes derelict, and vivifies still-born ideas; who, uniting in himself the aptitude to invent, the sagacity to distinguish, and the skill to execute, puts the world in lasting possession of that, which others had essayed, with such results only as tended to arrest the efforts of industry, and discredit the powers of art.

REPUBLICAN ITALY.

THE Italy of the middle ages,—when liberty had no other temple, and gave her four centuries of sway and glory, is a most interesting field of instruction for an American citizen. Her republics of that period furnish unique examples of the character and part which the merchant and tradesman may sustain in free governments; of the exalted ends to which their pursuits may be rendered subservient. In her lapse into servitude, in her present abjection, she may be still contemplated with profit, and be instrumental in checking that treacherous security to which a nation, so happily situated as the American, must ever be prone.

Altogether, the Italian Peninsula has more magnificent annals, various trophies, and choice gifts, than any other portion of the earth remarkable as the theatre of moral greatness. The destinies of Greece were, indeed, splendid; her achievements prodigious; the creations of her fancy unrivalled: but her history has not the sweep, majesty, variety, and instructiveness of the Roman; it begins, properly, with the establishment of the laws of Lycurgus, and ends with the death of Alexander :-She had no resurrection. Italy fills in some sort all ages, since the formation of the Roman power; she re-appears dispensing light and Christianity, after she had ceased to dispense laws, to the universe; she takes the lead among the nations of the west, and reclaims Europe from barbarism; she establishes a new and mighty influence over mankind, and, in restoring the literature of the ancients, produces one of her own, not unworthy of them, or of being compared with the best of the modern. In her present reprobate state of morals and politics, hers is still 16

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the empire of the arts; she cultivates the exact sciences with brilliant success, possesses a vast body of erudition; is strong in numbers, and not deficient in wealth; retains her physical advantages, and receives from nature the same rich endowments of mind: she draws to her from every quarter the enlightened and the curious, as much on account of what she is as what she was, and inspires not a few of them with the hopes of her regaining the energies which would soon replace her in the first rank of independent nations.

We could wish not only that our fleets should ride proudly in the Mediterranean, recollecting what Duillius and Lutatius accomplished, but that our youth should frequent in every part, the vast museum of monuments of genius and public virtue, which it washes. It is there that they would most deeply imbibe the spirit and the tastes by which the whole region is doubly immortalized, and through which they might give a like immortality to their own land.

Setting out at an age when the principles and habits appertaining to a sound American education should have taken root, and being committed to faithful Mentors, they would be inaccessible to the contagion of those degenerate morals and manners which we shall presently notice.

We could wish, too, that on their return home, they would report to the world what they had seen and felt. The ambition of authorship would occasion a better preparation, and inspire greater eagerness, for observing; and the instruction conveyed in native productions might be expected to work more efficaciously upon the public mind. We should be glad if the course here suggested were pursued by those whom the American government employs to represent it abroad; and this could be easily as to consult at the same time the reserve

done so

becoming their station, and the advancement of the literary intelligence and repute of their country.

An American liberally educated, and happily gifted, is, perhaps, the only person competent to produce a book on Italy, or any of the primary nations of Europe, which would have, in fact, the merit of novelty in the composition and seasoning. We would not wish him to write ambitiously; or to play the virtuoso in elaborate delineations of scenery and monuments on which a host of Cognoscenti and artists have already exhausted their sagacity and vocabularies: we would ask him merely to digest from his tablets the impressions, in their original vivacity, which he had received abroad; to state his own peculiar views of institutions, morals, manners, characters and events. If he connected with such an exposition those personal anecdotes of dramatic effect which can never be wanting to an active tourist; statistical details throwing light on the principles of political economy in general, or of useful application to that of his own country, and the embellishments of unaffected, pertinent scholarship, he would, besides furnishing to his countrymen points of view, veins of sentiment, judgments of criticism, and even forms of expression, at once novel, just, and captivating, fix ere long the attention of the readers of Europe, and do more towards establishing a literary reputation for us there, than could be done at present by any effort of the American pen in another department.

The most startling memento of the departed greatness of Venice is her Arsenal. Its vast extent, its massive structures, its magazines, founderies, armories, ropewalks, work-shops, bespeak what she was as a naval power. All is there now, a dead silence and undisturbed decay. It is, indeed, a full century since this republic, falsely so called, withdrew into a merely negative exist