his country.' With a gallantry too
characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his
taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of
discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington
Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he
is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed
our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite
to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an
undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the
Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation
of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of
that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an
intellectual _quid pro quo_, which will doubtless be received gratefully
by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its
co-nationality with Irving.

What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a
literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley
and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict. We venture,
however, to predict that the _National Review_ will not be called upon
to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces,
and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than
St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our
sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a _credo_ as
absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall
of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature,
whose principal defect--a defect to which the one infallible remedy is
daily applied by the winged mower--is youth, inquire into its leading
characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden
maturity.

It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently
reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed
their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of
branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise,
present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny
staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down
the rugged steeps of the past. We have begun to believe that our writers
are afflicted with a sort of myopy that shuts out effe