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trymen; but with the humble hope and firm resolve to expend their lives and their children's lives in the wilderness, for the sake of worshipping their God after the fashion of their own hearts. The situation and character of these men, who 'had they been as free from all sins as gluttony and drunkenness,' (so says one of their quaint historians) might have been canonized for saints,' are in the highest degree picturesque; and moreover afford a singular contrast to those of Raleigh's successors in the south, headed by that man of adventure, who had challenged a whole Ottaman army in his youth, carrying off the heads of three Turkish champions at his saddle-bow, and who was now solacing his riper years, amidst the cares of a colonial government, in the arms of the renowned Pocahontas. The gloomy but sustaining spirit of fanaticism in these, who had fled to the wilderness for conscience' sake; the disappointed avarice of those who had come to it for silver and gold; the stern ecclesiastical oligarchy first established in the east; the worldly time-serving despotism of Smith and the succeeding governors in the south; the one punishing with banishment and death that damnable heresie of affirming justification by works; the other promulgating in the new world the laws of the old to prevent sectarie infection' from creeping into the pale of mother church; the former denouncing temporal punishment and eternal wrath, against all idlers, common coasters, unprofitable fowlers, and tobacco takers; the latter formally enacting and literally executing that salutary law, that he who will not work shall not eat; the Virginian colony importing into the country a cargo of negroes, to entail the curse of slavery on their remotest posterity, in the same year that our first fathers were founding the liberties of America on the Plymouth rock, and Winthrop with his company of sturdy Independents, extending along the shores of Massachusetts the work which had been so happily begun, while refiners, goldsmiths, and jewellers,' 'poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth, than either to begin or maintain one,' as the old writers inform us, were still flocking over to the shores of Virginia. Such contrasts judiciously exhibited, as, notwithstanding the distance of the two colonies, they well might be, with no very unpardonable poetical license, especially by the link of the New Netherlands, while they supply at once an infinite variety of individual character to the

author's hands, could not fail to confer on a work of fiction the additional value of developing the political history of the times, and the first beginnings, perhaps, of those, conflicting sectional interests, which sometimes perplex us at the present day. Or if more rigid rules of composition require us to confine our views to the colony of Massachusetts Bay, for instance, what character could be more obsequious to the imagination than that of the moody and mysterious Blaxton ? who who was found by the colonists, the solitary lord of the little isthmus of Shawmut,* which he claimed and was allowed to hold against them, by the acknowledged right of established possession; of whom history only tells us that he had been a clergyman of the church of England, that he dissented equally from her canons, and those of his non-conforming brethren; but how or when he emigrated to America, and built his humble hut on a spot destined to become the seat of a populous and flourishing city, it tells us not. What shall we say to Sir Christopher, the knight of Jerusalem, a lineal descendant of the famous bishop of Winchester, who with the strange lady was travelling and revelling through the land, until he was stopped by the scandalized 'seekers of the Lord,' and arraigned on a charge of suspicion of bigamy, et alia enormia contra pacem, before such a judicial assembly as the politic Winthrop, the scholastic Cotton, the fiery and intolerant Dudley, with Underhill perhaps for a witness, and Miles Standish for captain of the guard? What would not the author of Waverly make of such materials? But we forbear to enlarge further on this prolific theme.

The Indian wars, of which the first occurred soon after the time of which we have just spoken, and the last of any note in New England, in the years 1722-25, are fruitful of incidents, which might, to great advantage, be interwoven with the materials before noticed; and it scarcely needs to be asserted, that the Indians themselves are a highly poetical people. Gradually receding before the tread of civilization, and taking from it only the principle of destruction, they seem to be fast wasting to utter dissolution; and we shall one day look upon their history, with such emotions of curiosity and wonder, as those with which we now survey the immense mounds and heaps of ruin in the interior of our continent, so extensive that they have hardly yet been measured, so ancient that they lie

The Indian name of the peninsula on which Boston now stands. New Series, No. 11. 33

buried in their own dust and covered with the growth of a thousand years, forcing upon the imagination the appalling thought of some great and flourishing, perhaps civilized people, who have been so utterly swept from the face of the earth, that they have not left even a traditionary name behind them. At the present day, enough is known of our aborigines to afford the ground-work of invention, enough is concealed to leave full play for the warmest imagination; and we see not why those superstitions of theirs, which have filled inanimate nature with a new order of spiritual beings, may not be successfully employed to supersede the worn out fables of Runic mythology, and light up a new train of glowing visions, at the touch of some future wizard of the West. At any rate we are confident that the savage warrior, who was not less beautiful and bold in his figurative diction, than in his attitude of death, the same who suffered not the grass to grow upon the warpath,' and hastened to extinguish the fire of his enemy with blood,' tracking his foe through the pathless forest, with instinctive sagacity, by the fallen leaf, the crushed moss, or the bent blade, patiently enduring cold, hunger, and watchfulness, while he crouched in the night-grass like the tiger expecting his prey, and finally springing on the unsuspicious victim with that war-whoop, which struck terror to the heart of the boldest planter of New England in her early day, is no mean instrument of the sublime and terrible of human agency. And if we may credit the flattering pictures of their best historian, the indefatigable Heckewelder, not a little of softer interest might be extracted from their domestic life.

Instead of wearying our reader with a formal disquisition on the characters and scenes of the third epoch, we beg leave to introduce him, without farther ceremony, if he has not already made the acquaintance, to Mr Harvey Birch, better known by the name of the Spy of the Neutral Ground; whom we greet, as doubtless the reader does also, with the greater satisfaction, in that he has taken a world of trouble off our hands, doing away the painful necessity of establishing by syllogism and inference this part of our proposition, viz, that the American revolution is an admirable basis, on which to found fictions of the highest order of romantic interest. This trouble is taken off our hands, however, not because the work before us is a perfect model of its kind, but because, whatever other deficiencies or deformities may appertain to it, want of interest, the only unpardonable sin of romance, is not among them.

We do not propose, however, to give a minute analysis of a work, which has already been some months before the public, and has withal sufficient notoriety to have reached its third edition. We have a right to assume, that our readers are fashionable enough to have kept pace with their neighbors, and shall therefore tell no more of the story, than we find necessary for our purpose.

The narrative turns on the fortunes of Henry Wharton, a captain in the royal army, (then under sir Henry Clinton, with head quarters at New York) who imprudently visits his father's family at West Chester, (the neutral ground,) in disguise, and there falls into the hands of an American party under the command of Major Dunwoodie, his sister's betrothed lover, and his own bosom friend. He is tried and condemned as a spy; but succeeds in making his escape by the assistance of Harvey Birch, the pedlar, himself a notorious British spy, and with the connivance of Washington, who, under the assumed character of Harper, had been an inmate at the house of Wharton's father, at the time of the stolen visit, and was firmly convinced of the young man's innocent intentions.

Harvey Birch, by whose mysterious agency every important incident in the book is more or less affected, though a convicted spy of the enemy, with a price set upon his head, turns out in the sequel to have been all along in secret the confidential and trusty agent of Washington.

This finely conceived character, on whom the interest of the narrative mainly depends, is not wholly without historical foundation. It is matter of notoriety, that no military commander ever availed himself of a judicious system of espionage with more consummate address, or greater advantage to his cause, than General Washington. The similarity of the bellige erents in all outward appearances, and their community of language, furnished both parties with great facilities for mutual deception. But the minute local knowledge of our commander in chief, his extensive information in regard to the manners, habits, and occupations of the persons with whom he had to deal, his own acute observation and discriminating judgment, united to an intimate acquaintance with the characters of individuals, gave him in this respect peculiar advantages, which he never failed to improve. A fund, liberal, considering the parsimony and extreme poverty of our government at that

time, was furnished by congress, expressly to be employed in secret services of this nature, and Washington was never sparing of his own purse when occasion demanded additional supplies. Hence he was enabled to maintain great numbers of secret agents, who were often at work unsuspected in the very heart of the British army, transmitting regular and authentic intelligence of its minutest operations; while his most confidential officers were profoundly ignorant of the means and sources of his information, and frequently received themselves that, on which they were directed to rely, without knowing the quarter whence it came. We do not state this without authority. We have it through a channel, which ought not to be doubted, that, at a time when General Heath was left by Washington in command, he was directed to make daily search in the hollow of a certain tree for despatches from the enemy's camp; and the search was seldom fruitless, though the general professed himself entirely unsuspicious of the person or persons by whom he was thus supplied. Many similar facts are probably known to officers now living; and although others, who stood high in the service, should not possess the same kind of information, this is a species of negative evidence, which can weigh little in the scale. That services of this sort should have been performed by persons commonly reputed to be disaffected to the American cause, and even by those who lived ostensibly in British pay, is a thing not only extremely probable in itself, but likewise a fact capable of being established by living testimony. Indeed we have, within these few days, held direct communication with a man then in this city, who, having first suffered his name to be stricken off the rolls of his regiment for desertion, entered into the service of sir Henry Clinton, as a private, and sir Henry thought confidential agent, while he was, in truth, a spy upon the movements of that officer, and constantly conveyed all his valuable information to the commander of the American armies, in conformity with the understanding that subsisted between them; and this was a man of sufficient respectability ro receive a captain's commission for his serviIt may well, however, be a matter of doubt, whether

ces.*

*This man had a secret pass from Washington, to be used in case of emergency. He was accustomed to carry his despatches rolled up, in shape and size like a bullet, that they might be swallowed, if necessary. Once, when employed by sir Henry, as the bearer of a despatch to sir Guy Carleton in Canada, he met a brother tory, charged with despatches, vice versa, from sir