victorious party killed the leading chief of the opposite tribes, and 'drank the blood as it gushed from the decollated head. The left 'eye was hastily scooped out, and swallowed by the demoniac 'leader, that it might add to the refulgence of his own eye, when 'at his death it would be translated as a star in heaven.' This chief was no other than the noted E'Ongi (usually written Shungie), who had made, previously to these hostilities, a visit to England, where he conducted himself with a manly, easy decorum; was introduced to George IV.; received much attention from a religious body with a view to engage his favour to missionaries; manifested a sagacious policy for the purposes of his ambition, in sedulously procuring useful implements, decidedly preferred by him to showy trifles; but was especially intent above all to supply himself with fire-arms and ammunition, a new aliment to his unmitigable ferocity. It was even believed that his eagerness, after his return to New Zealand, to prove the irresistible efficacy of these means of destruction in the hands of his warriors, was the real instigation to the war; while the pretext was, that one of his relations had been murdered and devoured by a neighbouring tribe. The leader of that tribe offered him any payment or satisfaction he should require; but he vowed extermination; and only a forlorn relic of the tribe was left alive, in slavery or dispersion. He was by far the most renowned and dreaded warrior in the island, or in the memory of its inhabitants. It was believed that he aspired to make himself master of them all-all that his ferocious massacres might leave in existence. But his own horrid life was prematurely brought to a close after a tedious decline, in consequence of a bullet-wound received fifteen months before; and of which our author's account, given, as it looks, in good faith, makes a more exhorbitant demand on our faith than any other thing in his book. Pursuing some retreating enemies to where they made a stand among bushes,

'E'Ongi, who fought after the native fashion, namely, by lurking behind the trunks of trees, stepped on one side to discharge his musket, when a ball struck him, supposed to have been discharged by one of his own party. It broke his collar bone, passed by an oblique direction through his right breast, and came out a little below his shoulderblade, close to the spine. The wound stopped his career. Most of the surgeons in the different whale-ships that entered the Bay of Islands, examined it, but found his case past all remedy. The wound never closed; and the whistling noise caused by the air in entering, afforded amusement to the chief.

His last moments were employed in strenuously exhorting his followers to be valiant, and defend themselves against the numerous enemies they had provoked, and who would take advantage of his departure to the Reinga, or world of spirits; adding, he wanted no other payment after his death. He besought them to allow the Church

Missionaries to subsist in peace, for they had eve acted for the best. His dying lips were employed in repeating the words kiá toá! kiá toá!' be courageous, be valiant. The demise of this indomitable warrior was awaited in fear and trembling by many of his nearest friends, who were fearful that the Hokianga chiefs would kill them as sacrifices to accompany their master's spirit; but the chief of the place bade them dismiss their fears.

The village resounded with the discordant tangi, and streams of blood were shed with the aid of the muscle-shell. Innumerable addresses and speeches were made on the merits of the deceased. Dancing and singing in mournful cadences ensued; while the chants of the Piké, descriptive of the valiant enterprises of the magnanimous defunct, with continual discharges of artillery, added to the solemnity of the scene.'-Vol. ii. p. 186.

He died in March, 1828. So absolute a fiend as he was in war and victory, he is described as of very mild and inoffensive habits in time of peace; liking to play with little children; extremely affectionate to his relations; and almost overwhelmed by the loss of several sons, and of a favorite wife, whom, though blind, he regarded as his best friend and wisest counsellor.

It is pleasing to be informed that the scene of his destructive exploits has become like an extinct volcano by his death. There has been no inheritor of his predominant power and ambition, and the chiefs in that northern territory have agreed in the policy of settling their differences in other ways than by mutual slaughter. The improvement is partly ascribed to the location of many Europeans among them. It was quite time to consider whether they should be willing to perish wholly from the earth. The face of the land is like the fine scenery of the tragic theatre; an enchanting imagery to set off the horror of crime and death; tracts smiling and glowing in natural beauty, but frowning with the memorial of exterminating murder. Our author surveyed one fair and fertile tract after another; which, within memory, or according to tradition, had once been occupied by a living multitude, but are now desolate; marked here and there with some traces and relics of the works of tribes extinct. We may wonder how the population should ever have been numerous, if their temper and habits were the same in past ages as within the period of our acquaintance with them. And when we take into view the wars, the treachery, the cannibalism, the infanticide, the suicides in honour of deceased relations, and the diseases imported from Europe, we may and do wonder that their numbers have been kept up to even the present amount.

A habitual distrust of one another prevails between the tribes; since they are mutually conscious of a disposition to watch for opportunities to take an advantage, inflict an injury, or wreak a revenge, with the least hazard to the aggressors. For it is re

markable how much cowardice lurks in a temperament which blazes up into rage and madness in actual conflict. Habitual suspicion and alarm are betrayed on all sides. In the course of an exploring journey, our author was amused at the evident terror of his band of stout young chieftains, on occasion of the sudden appearance, or reported approach, of some two or three strange men, till they were recognized as of a tribe not hostile. Even when such heroes are confronted in battle array, they are shy of commencing the fray, till some provocation fires their blood into reckless fury. The explosive suddenness of anger was often shown in the ordinary affairs of life. At some trifle of offence they would leap up, and caper, and rage about in frantic violence, with frightful gesticulations and grimaces. The Englishman would laugh at them, and by some adroit turn speedily reduce this outbreak to quietness or even good humour. Their fickleness and caprice were often an annoyance to him when he had to depend on their co-operation. His management was sometimes by humouring and bribing them, and sometimes by assuming the resolute tone of a master.

We have mentioned their affection for their relations. Parents show a doating fondness for their childen, who do whatever they like without fear of chastisement; and of course are often impertinent and insolent in return. Meetings after absence make what we are in the fashion of denominating a scene.

'One of the females who had accompanied us met with her father: whom she no sooner beheld, not having expected to see him in this village, than she fell on his neck, and embraced him with such marks of filial piety and tenderness as prevented me from being an unmoved spectator. The parent, who was quite gray, and bowed down with old age, applied his nose to hers, large tear-drops rolling in quick succession down his aged face, which the duteous daughter wiped away with her mat, that was soon saturated with their united tears.' -Vol. i. p. 117.

This was genuine, no doubt; and such was the warmth of parental affection in a man who would, very likely, have luxuriated in a feast on the roasted body of another parent's daughter, if obtained among the spoils of victory. Is it that in the savage, in the absence of all moral culture of the affections, the attachment of near relationship is therefore the stronger in the simple unmodified nature of an instinct, like that of the lower animals?

We wonder whether there be a philosophy that can assign the principle from which human beings should, equally on joyous and mournful occasions, affect a violent sorrow, and inflict on themselves frightful wounds, as in the ceremony denominated tangi, at once the most ludicrous and the most serious etiquette we have

ever read of. On a meeting, from a distance, of parties who are friends, or whose policy it is to appear so, they burst out into loud wailings, and lacerate their own flesh with the muscle-shell, till they stream with blood, to the dismay of an European spectator. On the arrival of the author's party at the village of a chief who gave them a friendly reception,

The abomination of the tangi commenced, in which the early sobs rose to shrieks and outcries that were truly dismal to hear; it reminded me of those unhappy people whose prostrate imagination conceives no hope. This howling lasted an hour; and as we had passed through many adventures (in the ideas of a native), it took some time to chant over. The women, as usual, were most outrageous in the lament; and cut gashes in their flesh with such ferocity, that I was fain glad to quit their vicinity, and visit the lions' of this metropolis. Vol. i. p. 164.

The reader may ask what curiosities, worthy of the cant denomination of lions,' there could be in the barbarian chief's headquarters? He will find them such objects as were formerly, and not so very long since, deemed not unfit for the neighbourhood of palaces, churches, and cathedrals. It should be in moderate terms that we express our censure on the court of New Zealand for retaining a fashion somewhat later than it went out ' in London.

6

"I was introduced to that part of the inclosure, where the heads of the enemy that had been captured during the week were placed on poles, in front of the house of the chief. I counted nine: there were three more placed on poles in front of the entrance gate to this part of the village, behind which was the cemetery. The latter heads had been in that situation for a month previous. They brought to recollection the refined taste that prompted a more civilized people to decorate the gates of their metropolis, the emporium of the fine arts, with ornaments of a similar nature, some 'sixty years since;' the discontinuance of which has been destructive to an itinerant profession; for we are told by Walpole, in his Private Correspondence,' that at a certain date he went to the Tower of London, and passed under the new heads at Temple Bar, where he saw people making a trade by letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look."Vol. i. p. 156.

Go a little further, however, in the story, and we disown the parallel, in behalf even of the druidical age of our nation; but must reconcile ourselves as well as we can to the fact of our standing in the relationship of humanity with whatever is the most degraded portion of it. The declaration that of one blood are made all nations, to dwell on all the face of the earth,' brings something of rebuke and humiliation to the pride of civilization and refinement, when we read of a section of our general kindred

having at this day such a taste and notion of luxury as that exhibited in the paragraph immediately following that just transcribed.

'These heads had chanted the war-song but four days previously; the bodies which had appertained to them danced the wild hākā, and had since been consigned to the oven, and nearly wholly devoured by the natives. Curious to see this abhorrent food, after it had undergone a culinary process, I requested a minor chief to show me some. He accordingly mounted a wátá, where the provisions are always kept, and brought down a small flax basket, containing the human viand. At first view I should have taken it for fresh pork in a boiled state, having the same pale cadaverous colour. My informant stated it was a piece of the lower part of the thigh, grasping with his hand that part of my body, illustrative of what he advanced. It appeared very much shrunk; and on my observing it must have appertained to a boy, the head of its possessor when alive, was pointed out to me, apparently a man of forty-five years of

age.

The sight of this piece of mortality afforded the chief some pleasure; for he stretched out his tongue, pretending to lick the food, and gave other significant signs, indicative of the excessive delight he felt in partaking of human flesh. He entered largely on the subject, pointing to many parts of my body, such as the palm of my hand, shoulders, and lower extremities, as being particularly delicate, even to the most fastidious.'-Vol. i. p. 167.

We wish we had been distinctly told that the women stand aloof from such abominations. In other respects our author has much to say in their favour. Here, as every where else, the allpervading depravity of the human race has a mitigation of its virulence in the female sex. There are in the work repeated strong testimonies to a degree of modesty, in the young females especially, which, amidst such habits and spectacles as they are accustomed to witness, could have been preserved only by an innate principle. Such of them as become the wives of Europeans, especially if they have been under the tuition, or become the converts, of the missionaries, accommodate themselves with admirable facility to the dress, good order, and all the decorums of civilized life. In the savage state they are remarkable for a devoted attachment to their husbands, much greater than, we dare say, any of those husbands deserve. It appears to be no uncommon occurrence for a wife to destroy herself on the death of her husband; and that not in servility to any dictate of superstition, as among the Hindoos, but from the impulse of genuine and desolate affection. It happened several times to Mr. P. to witness the funeral rites for such a self-immolated widow. The women share the common lot of their sex among all barbarous nations in