w going to be exceedingly solemn, serious and
pathetic; and hints, with that air of chuckling gratulation with which a
good dame draws forth a choice morsel from a cupboard to regale a
favorite, that this plague will give his history a most agreeable variety.

In like manner did my heart leap within me when I came to the dolorous
dilemma of Fort Good Hope, which I at once perceived to be the forerunner
of a series of great events and entertaining disasters. Such are the true
subjects for the historic pen. For what is history, in fact, but a kind of
Newgate Calendar--a register of the crimes and miseries that man has
inflicted on his fellow-men? It is a huge libel on human nature to which
we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were
building up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy, of our
species. If we turn over the pages of these chronicles that man has
written of himself, what are the characters dignified by the appellation
of great, and held up to the admiration of posterity? Tyrants, robbers,
conquerors, renowned only for the magnitude of their misdeeds and the
stupendous wrongs and miseries they have inflicted on mankind--warriors,
who have hired themselves to the trade of blood, not from motives of
virtuous patriotism, or to protect the injured and defenseless, but merely
to gain the vaunted glory of being adroit and successful in massacring
their fellow-beings! What are the great events that constitute a glorious
era? The fall of empires, the desolation of happy countries, splendid
cities smoking in their ruins, the proudest works of art tumbled in the
dust, the shrieks and groans of whole nations ascending unto heaven!

It is thus the historians may be said to thrive on the miseries of
mankind, like birds of prey which hover over the field of battle to fatten
on the mighty dead. It was observed by a great projector of inland lock
navigation, that rivers, lakes, and oceans were only formed to feed
canals. In like manner I am tempted to believe that plots, conspiracies,
wars, victories, and massacres are ordained by Providence only as food for
the historian.

It is a source of great delight to the philosophers, in studying the
wonderful economy of nature, to trace the mutual dependencies of
things--how they are created reciprocally for each other, and how the most
noxious and apparently unnecessary animal has its uses. Thus those swarms
of flies which are so often execrated