nnumerable newspapers that encumber
the land; and the number of gentlemen and ladies one meets who have
published a volume of Something and Other Poems, is perfectly
astounding.

The true secret seems to be, that the Americans, as a people, have not
received that education which enables a people to produce poets. For,
however true the _poeta nascitur_ adage may be negatively of
individuals, it is not true positively of nations. The formation of a
national poetic temperament is the work of a long education, and the
development of various influences. A peculiar classicality of taste,
involving a high critical standard, seems necessary, among the moderns,
to high poetic production; and such a taste has not yet been formed in
America. True, there are kinds of poetry--the Ballad and the Epic,
which, so far as we can trace them, are born, Pallas-like, full-grown;
which sound their fullest tone in a nation's infancy, and are but
faintly echoed in its maturity. But there are numbers in which lisps the
infancy, not of a nation merely, but of a race. And the Americans were
an old race though a young nation. They began with too much civilization
for the heroic school of poetry: they have not yet attained enough
cultivation for the philosophic.

[From the London Christian Times.]

SIR ROBERT PEEL.

All the ordinary incidents of the past week have been thrown into
temporary oblivion, by the lamentable occurrence that has deprived the
country of one of its most eminent statesmen; the House of Commons, of
one of its chiefs; the family of the right honorable baronet of its most
amiable and distinguished head; and many of the public institutions,
those of the fine arts especially, of an enlightened and generous
patron.

The late member for Tamworth was the eldest son of the first Sir R.
Peel, formerly of the house of Peel and Yates, which, in 1803, employed
about 15,000 persons at Bury, and which paid at that time L40,000 a year
duty on their printed cotton fabrics. In 1787, Mr. Peel married his
partner's daughter, Miss Yates, who bore the subject of this memoir--5th
February, 1788--in a little cottage, near Chamber Hall. The husband of
Miss Yates was very successful in his cotton speculations, and in 1798,
when the English Government appealed to the country for pecuniary aid to
carry on the French war, subscribed himself L10,000. Some notion may be
formed of the extent of the wealth of the first Sir R. Peel, from the
fac