n of which
we write, had three essential faults, all of which are sufficiently
general to be termed characteristic, in a national point of view. In
the first place, the instruments themselves were bad; in the next
place, they were assorted without any regard to harmony; and, in the
last place, their owners did not know how to use them. As in certain
American _cities_--the word is well applied here--she is esteemed the
greatest belle who can contrive to utter her nursery sentiments in
the loudest voice, so in Templeton, was he considered the ablest
musician who could give the greatest _eclat_ to a false note. In a
word, clamour was the one thing needful, and as regards time, that
great regulator of all harmonies, Paul Powis whispered to the captain
that the air they had just been listening to, resembled what the
sailors call a 'round robin;' or a particular mode of signing
complaints practised by seamen, in which the nicest observer cannot
tell which is the beginning, or which the end.

It required all the Parisian breeding of Mademoiselle Viefville to
preserve her gravity during this overture, though she kept her bright
animated, French-looking eyes, roaming over the assembly, with an air
of delight that, as Mr. Bragg would say, made her very popular. No
one else in the party from the Wigwam, Captain Truck excepted, dared
look up, but each kept his or her eyes riveted on the floor, as if in
silent enjoyment of the harmonies. As for the honest old seaman,
there was as much melody in the howling of a gale to his
unsophisticated ears, as in any thing else, and he saw no difference
between this feat of the Templeton band and the sighings of old
Boreas; and, to say the truth, our nautical critic was not so much
out of the way.

Of the oration it is scarcely necessary to say much, for if human
nature is the same in all ages, and under all circumstances, so is a
fourth of July oration. There were the usual allusions to Greece and
Rome, between the republics of which and that of this country there
exists some such affinity as is to be found between a horse-chestnut
and a chestnut-horse; or that, of mere words: and a long catalogue of
national glories that might very well have sufficed for all the
republics, both of antiquity and of our own time. But when the orator
came to speak of the American character, and particularly of the
intelligence of the nation, he was most felicitous, and made the
largest investments in popularit