the
shop-girl and the dancing-mistress might break their hearts with spite,
ere they could set up a system of dress in keeping with hoods of the
kind alluded to. We do not recommend, that distinction of dress
according to difference of rank should be carried to an undue limit; for
in the present age of the world, and especially in our country, where
the basis of society is shifting, and where the pivots of the commonweal
are loose, too little distinction of rank is allowed; rank is not
respected as it ought to be; but, nevertheless, the promiscuous jumbling
together and confounding of all men is carried too far; it is one of the
elements of republicanism and anarchy that we should do well to
discourage. To ladies, more than to men, would distinctions of dress be
useful, and with them they would be more practicable of reintroduction;
any thing that would tend to augment the outward respect of men for
women, and of women for each other, would be so much gained toward a
revival of some of the soundest maxims of former days.

Bonnets, then, to Orcus! Hoods to the seventh heaven!

H. L. J.

GERMAN-AMERICAN ROMANCES.

THE VICEROY AND THE ARISTOCRACY, OR MEXICO IN 1812.

PART THE FIRST.

The most obvious defect of the German school of romance is the universal
tendency of its writers to the indefinite and periphrastic, and the
consequent absence of the characteristic and the true in their
descriptions both of human and of external nature. Much of this
prevailing habit may perhaps be attributed to the example of Goethe,
who, in his works of fiction, narrates the adventures of A and B,
residing in the town of C, situate in some nameless and inscrutable
section of Germany. And when, to all this mystery, is superadded the
ponderous and ungraceful style of most German writers, and the Latin
construction of their interminable sentences, for the solution of which
the reader must wade to the final word, the lack of good original
novels, and the universal preference, in Germany, of translations from
French and English authors, will be readily accounted for. The main
source of these defects in the German writers may be found in their
retired and bookish habits. Shut up in their studies, with no companions
but their books and their meerschaums, and viewing the eternal world
through the loopholes of retreat, often anxious, too, to advance and
illustrate some pet theory of their own, their writings smell horribly
of the la