of course to receive when no longer novel, and whose hues
defy our art.

The wisest thing the United States could do, would be to appropriate
thirty or forty millions to the formation of a marine, not to secure the
coast, as our hen-roost statesmen are always preaching, but to keep in
our own hands the control of our own fortunes, by rendering our enmity
or friendship of so much account to Europe that no power shall ever
again dare trespass on our national rights:--and one of the next wisest
measures, I honestly believe, would be to appropriate at once a million
to the formation of a National Gallery, in which copies of the antique,
antiques themselves, pictures, bronzes, arabesques, and other models of
true taste, might be collected, before which the young aspirants for
fame might study, and with which become imbued, as the preliminary step
to an infusion of their merits into society. Without including the vast
influence of such a cultivation on the manners, associations,
intellects, and habits of the people--an influence that can scarcely be
appreciated too highly--fifty years would see the first cost returned
fifty-fold in the shape of the much-beloved dollars. Will this happen?
Not till men of enlightened minds--_statesmen_, instead of _political
partizans_--are sent to Washington. It is the misfortune of America to
lie so remote from the rest of the civilized world, as to feel little of
the impulses of a noble competition, our rivalry commonly limiting
itself to the vulgar exhibitions of individual vanity; and this the more
to our disadvantage, as, denied access to the best models for even this
humble species of contention with the antagonists we are compelled to
choose, victory is as bad as defeat.

One of the great impediments to a high class of improvement in America,
is the disposition to resent every intimation that we can be any better
than we are at present. Few, perhaps no country, has ever enduced so
much evil-disposed and unmerited abuse as our own. It is not difficult
to trace the reasons, and every American should meet it with a just and
manly indignation. But, being deemed a nation of rogues, barbarous, and
manifesting the vices of an ancestry of convicts, is a very different
thing from standing at the head of civilization. This tendency to repel
every suggestion of inferiority is one of the surest signs of provincial
habits; it is exactly the feeling with which the resident of the village
resents wha