that embalms it--cannot
be more destructive to the zoological pretensions of the unicorn, than
are to the same pretensions in the lion our many popular crazes about his
goodness and magnanimity, or the old fancy (adopted by Spenser, and noticed
by so many among our elder poets) of his graciousness to maiden innocence.
The wretch is the basest and most cowardly among the forest tribes; nor
has the sublime courage of the English bull-dog ever been so memorably
exhibited as in his hopeless fight at Warwick with the cowardly and cruel
lion called Wallace. Another of the traditional creatures, still doubtful,
is the mermaid, upon which Southey once remarked to me, that, if it
had been differently named (as, suppose, a mer-ape,) nobody would have
questioned its existence any more than that of sea-cows, sea-lions, &c.
The mermaid has been discredited by her human name and her legendary human
habits. If she would not coquette so much with melancholy sailors, and
brush her hair so assiduously upon solitary rocks, she would be carried on
our books for as honest a reality, as decent a female, as many that are
assessed to the poor-rates.]

[NOTE 9.

"_Audacity_!"--Such the French accounted it; and it has struck me that
Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period of her
present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of his visit to
that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which he spoke of
us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. As though it
had been mere felony in our army to look a French one in the face, he said
more than once--"Here are the English--we have them: they are caught _en
flagrant delit_" Yet no man should have known us better; no man had drunk
deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had in the north of Portugal,
during the flight from an English army, and subsequently at Albuera, in the
bloodiest of recorded battles.]

[NOTE 10.

"_Three hundred_." Of necessity this scale of measurement, to an American,
if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. Accordingly, I
remember a case in which an American writer indulges himself in the luxury
of a little lying, by ascribing to an Englishman a pompous account of
the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas of grandeur, and
concluding in something like these terms:--"And, sir, arriving at London,
this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of at least two furlongs,
having,