to writers, who, however they may assimilate in their opinions, can never be quite indentified with ourselves. If they do not differ in religion, politics, manners, and morals; if they even clothe their ideas in precisely the same language, still they mean a different thing, or a different degree of the same thing. When a sober and rational English writer talks of liberty, he means, not United States' liberty-he means a sort of free slavery, which to the people of this country would be quite intolerable. He means distinctions of rank; an established church with exclusive privileges; a hereditary monarch; hereditary nobles; hereditary legislators; hereditary distinctions of every kind; a system of orders in council; a representative assembly which does not represent the people; a nobility of incalculable wealth; a government of almost unlimited resources, derived from almost unlimited taxation. In short, by British freedom, he means almost every thing we took up arms to free ourselves from. In applying the language of England to political subjects, we have given a force and meaning to a vast many important words, which can hardly be comprehended by Englishmen themselves. The words are indeed the same; but in the expression of our feelings, and in their application to our situation, institutions, and government, they constitute, so far as they go, a different language. No foreign writer can, for this reason, speak so directly to the feelings and comprehension of the people of the United States, as one nurtured among them, partaking equally in the same original peculiarities, and standing in precisely the same situation with themselves, in relation to the subjects of which he treats.

For this, as well as other powerful reasons, every nation ought, as soon as possible, to have a literature of its own, adapted to its peculiar situation; addressing itself, on all proper occasions, to the national feeling; and administering, either directly or indirectly, as the subject may warrant, to the support of the national honour. To no people now existing, or that have ever had an existence, does this assertion apply more forcibly than to those of the United States. They stand alone in the world. Their government is peculiar to themselves; they have carried the practical application of free principles so far beyond any of their contemporaries, that not only the feeling of common interest, arising from similarity of government, no longer exists between them and other states, but it has become the common interest of all despotic or monarchial governments, to undermine their institutions, to misrepresent their character, and to weaken, by every open and insidious means, their attachment to free principles. Their example is every day becoming more dangerous to the existence of ancient abuses, and it would seem that nothing can preserve these from utter annihilation, but the people of the United States becoming traitors to themselves, and surrendering their indepen

dence of thought at the shrine of imaginary European superiority. Believing, as we do, that much of the happiness of the present, as well as future generations, rests on the preservation of our pure republican forms of government, which, as they sprang from public opinion, must depend upon the continuance of that opinion, we will go so far as to say, that if there was no other objection to our indiscriminate adoption of foreign literature, its general inapplicability to our political situation, is alone sufficient to make us anxious for a school of our own. We do not mean a school barbarously independent of rules and models; but one of sentiments and opinions applicable to our moral and political state.

In a mere literary point of view, however, the great objection to a habit of imitation, is, that in its indiscriminate exercise, it is far more apt to select bad models than good. It is a trite saying, that it is much more easy to imitate faults than beauties; and hence it has almost always been found, that in selecting a writer for imitation, his prominent defects appear much more conspicuous than his excellencies, in the copy. Imitation also destroys all the charm of novelty, which is so important a constituent in works of imagination. This remark applies with peculiar force to an imitation of authors who write in the same language, and whose works are, as a matter of course, intimately known to almost every general reader in this country. An imitation of a classic, would only be detected by a classical reader; but an imitation of a popular English writer, admitting it were ever so successful, would only the more pall upon the general reader, to whom the original would be familiar. A general acquaintance and familiarity with English literature, is of the greatest advantage to a young American writer, in forming his taste, and enlarging the sphere of his knowledge and perceptions; but an abject imitation of any particular work, or any particular writer, if it does not bespeak inferiority, is pretty sure to create it in the end.

Imitation has another disadvantage; it is almost certain to follow the present fashion, whatever it may be. The gentle sex, from habit, education, and a facility of disposition, which only makes them the more interesting, do not adopt the fashion of a French bonnet with more eager alacrity, than an imitative writer does a new and fashionable style of writing. The most admired bard, or novelist, for the time being, is ever his pole-star and his oracle; and thus is the nation, among whom this habit of imitation prevails, for ever at the mercy of the taste of foreigners. At one period it was the fashion, never to string a lyre but to the measure of Marmion or the Lady of the Lake. All the peculiarities and irregularities of Sir Walter Scott's style of versification, which are now, and will always continue to be received by sound criticism as defects in his composition, were copied with the most happy success, by a vast many really clever poets, who seemed

to confine their efforts to an imitation of his blemishes, forgetful of the varied and intrinsic beauties that gloriously redeemed them all. Another class confined itself principally to the amatory effusions of Thomas Moore, which, uniting within themselves the charm of poetry and music, attracted the parasitical plants of literature, and those who could not reach his honeyed couplets, or epigrammatic voluptuousness, supplied their places with tuneful nonsense or bald indelicacy. To him succeeded Lord Byron, in whose patrician livery a crowd of ambitious young bards forthwith arrayed themselves, and whose occasionally fine deep-toned sentiment, harsh misanthropy, splenetic impatience, biting sarcasm, and querulous complainings, they imagined they imitated by railing at the world, and exhibiting all the burlesque antics of affected sentiment. The gloom of night came over the sunny region of fancy, and Parnassus was thenceforward enveloped in a veil of mists and obscurity. It is with mingled pride and pleasure we notice, that those of our native poets, who have attained the highest distinction, are free from a gross imitation of the peculiar style and manner of any particular fashionable model, and distinguished by certain individual characteristics of originality.

But all these successively conflicting tastes were at once swallowed up, and annihilated as it were, by the appearance of the "Great Unknown," as the critics have so long wilfully denominated the Author of Waverley. With a facility happy for himself, but we cannot help thinking, rather mischievous to the general dignity and interests of the higher species of literature, he adapted history to the purposes of romance, and by the resources of a memory which seems to have been inexhaustible in supplying materials for his imagination to embellish, he achieved one of the most singular triumphs, that of giving interest and variety to a series of fictions, of most unparalleled rapidity and duration, having a strong family likeness in their most material constituents, which would have been fatal to a writer of less vigour and vivacity. No author, probably, ancient or modern, was ever so well paid by the booksellers, or so universally read by all classes of people; nor can his acknowledged merits entirely and satisfactorily account for this overwhelming popularity. Good fortune, as well as uncommon felicity in the choice and manner of treating his subjects, undoubtedly co-operated in building up, almost in a single night, a reputation, which preceding writers, of at least equal merit, owed to time and to posterity. Much of this may be ascribed to Sir Walter Scott's genius; something to the influence of fashion; and not a little, probably, to an adroit and elaborate system of professional puffing, which we verily and in our hearts believe, Sir Walter despises as much as we do ourselves. All those who read at all, from the highest to the lowest, devoured with unsated appetite, these fictions, as they appeared with unexampled rapidi

ty; all admired with an intensity of fashionable enthusiasm, or at least those who did not admire, were ashamed to confess it; and even the critics, whose business it is to discriminate, did homage to the universal taste, by indiscriminate praise. It was not in the nature of man, that an author, so fashionable, so successful, and so munificently rewarded, should not have found imitators, even had he possessed only a tithe of the excellence of Sir Walter Scott. Accordingly, the old school of novels underwent a complete French Revolution in England, and, by a natural consequence, in this country. The well-thumbed stock of the circulating libraries fell into the hands of kitchen maids, or into the fire; the Mysteries of Udolpho could no longer keep people awake at night; Tom Jones was ignominiously turned out of doors by the country squires, as he was by the good squire Allworthy; Sir Charles Grandison gave place to a race of heroes who never made a bow in their lives; Miss Edgeworth was eclipsed, though we hope only for a time, to emerge the more brightly; the present age surrendered to the past; romance became history, history, romance; and truth was no longer to be found, not even in ladies eyes, or at the bottom of a well. Peers became romantic, and grave statesmen edited novels.

Numerous labourers, almost as a matter of course, appeared to cultivate this new and fertile field, which offered such a rich and plenteous harvest. They, however, for the most part, followed the track of all imitators; they selected the faults of the great original, and left the beauties to take care of themselves. They worked up the occasional coarseness into pictures, characters, and conversations, disfigured by additional coarseness; they improved upon adventures already carried, to say the least, to the highest allowable pitch of modern extravagance; they caricatured those defects of plan and arrangement, which were the inevitable consequences of the rapidity with which these works were composed, by a total abandonment of all regard to propriety, connexion, or probability; and when they happened to select a fine characteristic, or a striking personage for imitation, they, for the most part, seized the shadow, and suffered the substance to escape them or they rendered what was before a picturesque novelty, trite, tedious, and vulgar, by unvaried repetition. The easy, flowing, and natural style of Sir Walter, (always excepting the mystical old ladies ;) the clear conception, and happy discrimination of character; the rich unaffected sentiment; the beautiful descriptions of scenery; the animated action; and above all, the strong infusion of good manly sense, which gives dignity even to occasional extravagance, all evaporated in the crucible of too many of these unskilful alchymists, who, instead of extracting the precious metals from the mass, contented themselves with transmuting the gold into lead. The work which we have placed at the head of this article, is

an example of this most common species of imitation; although, beyond doubt, the production of one who could have done much better, had he trusted to his own original conceptions, or condescended to copy nature, as she may be found in this country, as well as in others. In the romance of Guy Mannering, perhaps the most pleasing and interesting of the Waverley series, if not the most perfect, appeared for the first time, one of those mystical women, who contributed, for a while, so materially to give piquancy to these productions. Meg Merrilies burst upon the world as a phenomenon, either in, or out of nature, people could hardly tell which; a creation hitherto unknown in works aspiring to a character of reasonable probability; a being of an order with which neither experience nor imagination had afforded us any communion. Ignorance, was in her, seen coupled with all the inspiration of eloquence; poverty associated with sublimity; rags with high-wrought sentiment; theft with heroism; female weakness with Herculean strength; ill health with powers of performing and enduring,, what never woman before performed or endured; and royal declamation with beggarly housewifery. The combination was extraordinary, and as fashionable people delight in extraordinary things, Meg Merrilies was received with enthusiasm in the Beau-monde, which was quite sated with sentimental and lovelorn heroines. The character seems also to have been a favourite with its author, and has, with slight variations, been introduced into many of Sir Walter's subsequent romances. Meg Merrilies is, however, the great original, as well as by far the best of all the mystical tribe of declamatory ladies, to which she has given birth. There is not one of them that partakes so much of the incomprehensible sublimity; of such apparent omniscience, as well as omnipresence; and with the exception of "Norna of the Fitful Head," not one who can hold a candle to her in the noble inspiration of scolding.

From the first appearance of Meg, the race of female Ciceros multiplied exceedingly in the fertile regions of romantic fiction, though we have the best authority for assuring our readers, they have proportionably decreased in real life. The old ladies talked -we mean in the modern roman"ye gods, how they did talk!"-V ces. Nothing could compare with the eloquent, overwhelming facility of their declamations, but the incomprehensible influence they exercised; the unaccountable impulses by which they were actuated; and the still more unaccountable means by which they accomplished their ends. Thenceforward, down to the present time, we have been so familiarized to the lecturing and Hectoring of these awful viragoes, that the stoutest female tongue in Christendom cannot appal us. Since the appearance of the Wa