And one sad dirge of misery
Fill'd all the mourning land."

_Foreign Quarterly Review_.


* * * * *


ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES.


The discouragement of colonization is certainly not the feeling of the
great majority of the people of England, and it is equally certain
that it is not the policy of this empire. Whatever may be the fate of
the several British colonies at some future and distant period, it is
something at least to have spread our laws and language, and moral
character, over the most distant parts of the globe. The colonies that
speak the language of Old England--that preserve her manners and her
habits--will always be her best customers; and their surplus capital
will always centre in the mother country. It was not the opinion of
our ancestors, that colonies were an incumbrance; they--good, stupid
souls--imagined that colonies enlarged the sphere of commerce---that
commerce required ships--that ships created seamen for manning the
royal navy, and that the whole contributed to individual wealth, to
the national revenue, and the national strength; and such we believe
still to be the opinion of men of sound practical knowledge, whose
minds are unwarped by abstract systems and preconceived theories, to
which every thing must be made to bend. Such, too, was the feeling of
that extraordinary man, who, with the solitary exception of England,