DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OF POMPEII.

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exterior presented only a dead wall. The inducements to the adoption of this plan were, seclusion from observation, protection, and jealousy as to the female portion of the family. The apartments for the accommodation of private life, appear to have been what we should deem very inconveniently small, even in those houses of the more stately rank which had circumstances of exterior magnificence. They were, however, highly ornamented.

"The smallest apartments were lined with stucco, painted in the most brilliant and endless variety of colours, in compartments, simply tinted with a light ground, surrounded by a border, sometimes embellished with a single figure, or subject, in the centre, or at equal distances, and everywhere exhibiting that taste each individual of Pompeii seems to have been anxious to display. These paintings were very frequently of history, but embrace every variety of subject, some of the most exquisite beauty. Greek artists seem to have been employed; indeed, native painters were few, while the former everywhere abounded.

"The doors, formed of wood, are never found complete; this material, being always reduced to carbon, and retaining only the general form. They revolved upon pivots, and were fastened by bolts, which hung from chains. The windows were sometimes glazed [a glazed bow-window was found in one instance]; they were closed at night by shutters, not too well put together; but the gaping chinks were covered with curtains. Of wood were also the bedsteads, though sometimes of iron; but beds were more generally made merely of carpets and vests spread upon the ground."

HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE AND IMPLEMENTS FOUND AT POMPEII.

"It does not enter within the plan of this work to give detailed accounts of every article of household furniture or convenience found at Pompeii; suffice it to say, that almost every variety has been found and placed in the museum of Portici. Implements of silver, brass, stone, earthenware vases of all sizes, adapted to every use, whether sacred or profane; trumpets, bells, gridirons, colanders, saucepans, some lined with silver, kettles, ladles, moulds for jelly or pastry, urns for keeping water hot, upon the principle of the modern tea-urn, lanterns with horn, spits; in short, almost every article of kitchen or other furniture now in use, except forks. Chains, bolts, portable fire-places, with contrivances for heating water; dice (some said to be loaded); a complete toilet, with combs, thimbles, rings, paint,

ear-rings, with pearls; pins for the hair, but no diamonds; almonds, dates, nuts, figs, grapes, eggs, raisins, and chesnuts. Also a loaf of bread, eight inches diameter, with a stamp expressing its quality and the baker's name.'

ROGER WILLIAMS, THE AMERICAN PILGRIM.*

WHATCHEER was a salutation from a tribe of savages to a family of Christian exiles, uttered at a time and place which gave it an important significance. The denomination Whatcheer Cove, then given to the spot, and still retained, has contributed to perpetuate the tradition.

The scenes are laid chiefly among the savages, such as those tribes were some two centuries since.

The doom of that race, progressively accomplishing from the commencement of the colony, and now proceeding with accelerated rapidity towards its consummation, appears an anomalous as well as a mournful chapter of human history. That a numerous section of the human race, in full and immemorial possession of a vast continent, of a high-toned and intrepid temperament, and well endowed with mental faculty, must absolutely, inevitably, perish under the progressive ascendancy of civilization on their territories, would have been a prediction to bring into more than doubt the pretensions of any oracle that should have ventured to pronounce it. Could anything have appeared less probable, than that the arrival on their coast of a small party of virtuous and religious men, self-exiled for conscience' sake, bringing with them the useful arts, the principles of civil society, and the true religion, should be the signal for the destruction of all the primitive race, from one side of the continent to the other?

To a great extent it has already been accomplished. Some tribes, of magnitude enough in numbers, power, and extent of domain, to be called nations, have wholly perished. Of others there exist only relics, degraded, forlorn, and gradually dwindling away, under the effects of ardent spirits,

* Whatcheer; or, Roger Williams in Banishment: a Poem. By Job Durfee, Esq., late Member of Congress, and now Judge of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island. Providence, Rhode Island. 1832.

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aggravated diseases, mutual slaughters, and the rapid encroachments of the white invaders of the forests. Recent accounts inform us of the prevalence, in the western tracts, of an intensely malignant pestilence, resembling the Black Death which once half desolated Europe. It kills its victims in two hours. It has almost wholly destroyed several minor tribes, and made frightful ravages in the larger; among others the Black Feet and the Crows, who make so conspicuous a figure in some of Washington Irving's interesting memoir-romances.

THE ABORIGINES GRADUALLY EXTERMINATED BY THE

MARCH OF CIVILIZATION.

But the grand comprehensive agent of destruction is the continual advance, on the whole line of the middle regions of the continent, of the European race, occupying, within each short term of years, some millions of acres more of what had been the inheritance of the Indians from their forefathers. Enfeebled in numbers, and broken in spirit, the tribes retreat westward, under an impulsion of which the peremptory nature is but thinly disguised in the semblance of a cession by sale. They fall back to become in their turn invaders of the territories of other nations, or to perish in conflicts for hunting grounds, without which they cannot exist. It costs the government nothing to make a plausible representation to them of vast tracts unappropriated ; pretending to guarantee the possession. They will be sure to find claimants there, who may fairly allege, that they were no parties to the treaty or bargain which has sent these aliens to share their forests, and devour the game. But it will signify little to them in the end whether they combat or combine; for the movement threatens them all, and can know no limit or pause. At no very distant time, the remoter tribes will begin to feel the pressure coming on them of the same irresistible power. And if, forced backward from one river, forest, and prairie, after another, they shall think to make the mighty range of the Rocky Mountains the final barrier between them and the insatiable monopolist, the next generations of them are destined to find that its ridges, snows, and formidable defiles, have not availed; so that they have nothing at last behind them but plainly the Pacific Ocean. The collective race is doomed to

extinction. Their wild nature never will, with trifling exceptions, submit to a fixed and industrious state of life, which, in spite of all the benefits they see attending it, they regard as both a misery and a dishonour. But even if they could be brought to overcome their repugnance, and make trial of the change, they would do it under such disadvantages, in comparison and competition with the intrusive occupants of their country, as no fortitude of such ill-prepared cultivators could bear them through.

RECESSION OF WILD ANIMALS CONCURRENT WITH THE

ADVANCE OF CIVILIZATION.

While abandoned irretrievably to their roving, hunting, and fighting, the Indians suffer not only by the encroachment on their ancient territory, but by a disaster which falls on that which they nominally retain. It is a remarkable circumstance that the wild animals, the main resource of savages, retire as by some instinct at the approach of the civilized population, even when yet at a great distance; retreating hundreds of miles away from the operations and noises disturbing their wilderness. So that no small part of the lands successively ceded had, previously, become nearly useless to the Indians for affording their indispensable subsistence. This retreat of their means of living, so far beyond the actual limit of the invading cultivation, might well be mistaken by the superstitious savages for the effect of some power of sorcery, or intervention of a malignant spirit, operating in advance of the race come to supplant them.

APOLOGY FOR COLONIZATION.

The question arises-what must or can be done with or for the irreclaimable aborigines, by a powerful civilized nation of colonists. No one, we suppose, will be so romantic in philanthropy as to insist, that a vast portion of the earth is to be held sacred in perpetuity to some wild hordes of human creatures, of a number that, in a civilized condition-the condition which man was intended for-might subsist and flourish on a hundredth part of the space. By such a rule what would our own island have been at this time? Ought the Anglo-Americans, rapidly augmenting in numbers, turning the desert into fruitful fields, carrying with them in their advance a civilized polity,

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cultivation of mind, useful ever-growing knowledge, and the lights of religion-ought they, on arriving at a particular brook, or touching the edge of some forest or savannah, to feel themselves arrested there, in deference to an inviolable right of a certain band of savages, who might come to that neighbourhood once or twice a year to hunt buffaloes? Ought they to feel themselves so arrested as to be precluded from progressively appropriating the ground by purchase; to be forbidden to think of it, as foreseeing that the acquirement of the territory would inevitably cause a bearing back of the tribe on other tribes, and produce conflict and destruction? Ought they, instead of pursuing their course, to recoil on themselves, to seek out lines and corners not so tabooed, and expend their labour on bogs and sterile spots, where the aboriginal hunters' right would not be infringed? Are they bound to believe that the claims of man to the use of the earth are incomparably the largest in that portion of the species which can make the least use of it, and which sink the nearest to a level with the irrational animals that share possession with them; only surpassing the most ferocious of those animals in propensity to riot in combat, carnage, and torture? We think not. It would doubtless, however, be their duty to cast about for any practicable means of redeeming such degraded members of the human family from their wretched condition; although the experiment would assuredly be met by direct and powerful cause of frustration in the very circumstance, of the boundless desert, their patrimony, being left and secured to them clear of intrusion. Such unconfined scope for their roving existence would serve to perpetuate their barbarous condition, transmitted from their ancestors, and every individual of them would continue to be trained in it; acquiring and inheriting a disposition abhorrent confinement and regular labour.

THE TIMES OF THE RED MEN.

The author carries us back to a time when red men presented an improving spectacle. The tribes were powerful in numbers. The ancestral pride of independence and valour sat on their brow, frowning contempt on tillers of the soil, the toiling slaves of workshops, the degraded