Should not beneath their ruby casket cover
One tooth of pearl! *

But, like a rose beside the church-yard-stone,
Be doom'd to blush o'er many a mouldering bone!
There was

There was a student of the college, too,
Who said

Much more about the riches of his head,
Than, if there were an income-tax on brains,
His head could venture to acknowledge to.
I ask'd the Scholar

If his what d'ye call her?

Alma Mater and her Bishop

Properly follow'd the Marquis's wish up, †

* Polygnotus was the first painter, says Pliny, who showed the teeth in his portraits. He would scarcely, I think, have been tempted to such an innovation in America.

The Marquis de CHASTELLUX, in his wise letter to Mr. Maddison, Professor of Philosophy in the College of William and Mary, at Williamsburgh, dwells with much earnestness on the attention which should be paid to dancing. -See his Travels. This college, the only one in the state of Virginia, and the first which I saw in America, gave me but a melancholy idea of republican seats of learning. That contempt for the elegancies of education, which the American democrats affect, is no where more grossly conspicuous than in Virginia: the young men, who look for advancement, study rather to be demagogues than politicians; and as every

And were much advancing

In dancing?

The evening now grew dark and still;
The whip-poor-will

Sung pensively on every tree;

And strait I fell into a reverie

Upon that man of gallantry and pith,
Captain Smith.*

thing that distinguishes from the multitude is supposed to be invidious and unpopular, the levelling system is applied to education, and has had all the effect which its partizans could desire, by producing a most extensive equality of ignorance. The Abbé RAYNAL, in his prophetic admonitions to the Americans, directing their attention very strongly to learned establishments, says, "When the youth of a country are seen depraved, the nation is on the decline.” I know not what the Abbé Raynal would pronounce of this nation now, were he alive to know the morals of the young students at Williamsburgh! But when he wrote, his countrymen had not yet introduced the "doctrinam deos spernentem" into America.

* John Smith, a famous traveller, and by far the most enterprising of the first settlers in Virginia. How much he was indebted to the interesting young Pocahuntas, daughter of King Powhatan, may be seen in all the histories of this colony. In the Dedication of his own work to the Duchess of Richmond he thus enumerates his bonnes fortunes: "Yet my comfort is, that heretofore honorable and vertuous Ladies, and comparable but among themselves, have offered me rescue and protection in my greatest dangers. Even in forraine parts I have felt reliefe from that sex. The beauteous Lady

And very strange it seem'd to me, That, after having kiss'd so grand a Dame as Lady Trabigzanda,

By any chance he

Could take a fancy

To a nymph, with such a copper front as
Pocahuntas!

And now, as through the gloom so dark,
The fire-flies scatter'd many a fiery spark,
To one, that glittered on the quaker's bonnet,
I wrote a sonnet. *

And

two lines more had just completed it; But, at the moment I repeated it,

Trabigzanda, when I was a slave to the Turks, did all she could to secure me. When I overcame the Bashaw of Nalbrits in Tartaria, the charitable Lady Callamata supplyed my necessities. In the utmost of my extremities, that blessed Pokahuntas, the great King's daughter of Virginia, oft saved my life."

DAVIS, in his whimsical Travels through America, has manufactured into a kind of romance the loves of Mr. Rolfe with this "opaci maxima mundi," Pocahuntas.

* For the Sonnet, see page 138.

VOL. II.

14

Our stage,

Which good Brissot, with brains so critical

And sage,

Calleth the true "machine political") * With all its load of uncles, scholars, nieces, Together jumbled,

Tumbled

Into a rut and fell to pieces!

Good night!-my bed must be,
By this time, warm enough for me,
Because I find old Ephraim Steady
And Miss his niece are there already!

Some cavillers

Object to sleep with fellow-travellers;

"The American stages are the true political carriages.” BRISSOT's Travels, letter 6th.-There is nothing more amusing than the philosophical singeries of these French travellers. In one of the letters of Clavière, prefixed to those of Brissot, upon their plan for establishing a republic of philosophers in some part of the western world, he intreats Brissot to be particular in choosing a place "where there are no musquitoes:" forsooth, ne quid respublica detrimenti caperet!

But

Saints protect the pretty quaker,

Heaven forbid that I should wake her!

TO A FRIEND.

WHEN next you see the black eyed Caty,

The loving, languid girl of Hayti,

Whose finger so expertly plays

*

Amid the ribbon's silken maze,
Just like Aurora, when she ties
A rainbow round the morning skies!

Say, that I hope, when winter's o'er,
On Norfolk's bank again to rove,
And then shall search the ribbon store

For some of Caty's softest love.

* Among the West-Indian French at Norfolk, there are some very interesting Saint Domingo girls, who, in the day, sell millinery, etc., and at night assemble in little cotillion parties, where they dance away the remembrance of their unfortunate country, and forget the miseries which "les amis des noirs" have brought upon them.