Thus is it that we can deceive ourselves. Thus is it that thousands can sacrifice principle, competence, and inward peace, in the mania for expense, while they steel their minds against the conviction that their own folly is the living fountain of their distresses. If the signs of the times must be looked to for the causes of pecuniary embarrassment in private life, they are to be found in the desertion of the wholesome economy of former days by all classes of society, and by the middle orders in particular. They are to be sought in the general disposition to grasp at indulgences which our means do not warrant. Luxury and profusion have become the deities of our hearths; the desire of vying with superiors, and outdoing equals, the only ambition of English hospitality. The reproach which the satirist applied to the degenerate matrons of Rome may, in our times, and in our country, be equally shared by the sexes "Nulla pudorem Paupertatis habet; nec se metitur ad illum Quem dedit hæc posuitque modum ; At velut exhaustâ redivivus pullulet arcâ Non unquam reputant, quanti sibi gaudia constent." INDIAN WARFARE. "Through tangled forests, and through dangerous ways, Where beasts with man divided empire claim, And the brown Indian marks with murderous aim." GOLDSMITH. INDIAN WARFARE. MANY circumstances of deep and romantic interest are attached to the events of our alliance with the Indian Tribes, during the last war in the Canadas. Of these, some are already before the public; but there are others which, though known to, and capable of being authenticated by, hundreds of living witnesses, have remained hitherto unrecorded. They are already rapidly passing into oblivion; for no hand has yet been put forth to arrest their flight and chain them to the page of history. I shall therefore be excused if I devote a paper of these my lucubrations—shortlived and fleeting as they must themselves be Y |