to fly. Another horse was brought him: his faithful adalid guided him by one of the steepest paths, which lasted four leagues; the enemy still hanging on his traces, and thinning the scanty ranks of his followers. At length the marquis reached the extremity of the mountain-defiles, and, with a haggard remnant of his men, escaped by dint of hoof to Antequera.

The count of Cifuentes, with a few of his retainers, in attempting to follow the Marquis of Cadiz, wandered into a narrow pass, where they were completely surrounded by the band of El Zagal. Finding all attempt at escape impossible, and resistance vain, the worthy count surrendered himself prisoner, as did also his brother, Don Pedro de Silva, and the few of his retainers who survived.

The dawn of day found Don Alonzo de Aguilar, with a handful of his adherents, still among the mountains. They had attempted to follow the marquis of Cadiz, but had been obliged to pause and defend themselves against the thickening forces of the enemy. They at length traversed the mountain, and reached the same valley where the marquis had made his last disastrous stand. Wearied and perplexed, they sheltered themselves in a natural grotto, under an overhanging rock, which kept off the darts of the enemy; while a bubbling fountain gave them the means of slaking their raging thirst, and refreshing their exhausted steeds. As day broke, the scene of slaughter unfolded its horrors. There lay the noble brothers and nephews of the gallant marquis, transfixed with darts, or gashed and bruised with unseemly wounds; while many other gallant cavaliers were stretched out dead and dying around, some of them partly stripped and plundered by the Moors. De Aguilar was a pious knight, but his piety was not humble and resigned, like that of the worthy master of Santiago. He imprecated holy curses upon the infidels, for having thus laid low the flower of Christian chivalry, and he vowed in his heart bitter vengeance upon the surrounding country. By degrees the little force of de Aguilar was augmented by numbers of fugitives, who issued from caves and chasms, where they had taken refuge in the night. A little band of mounted knights

was gradually formed, and the Moors having abandoned the heights to collect the spoils of the slain, this gallant but forlorn squadron was enabled to retreat to Antequera.

This disastrous affair lasted from Thursday evening throughout Friday, the twentyfirst of March, the festival of St. Benedict. It is still recorded in Spanish calendars, as the defeat of the mountains of Malaga; and the place where the greatest slaughter took place is pointed out to the present day, and is called La cuesta de la matanza, or the hill of the massacre." The principal leaders who survived returned to Antequera; many of the knights took refuge in Alhama, and others wandered about the mountains for eight days, living on roots and herbs, hiding themselves during the day, and roaming forth at night. So enfeebled and disheartened were they, that they offered no resistance if attacked. Three or four soldiers would surrender to a Moorish peasant, and even the women of Malaga sallied forth and made prisoners. Some were thrown into the dungeons of frontier-towns; others led captive to Granada; but by far the greater number were conducted to Malaga, the city they had threatened to attack. Two hundred and fifty principal cavaliers, alcaides, commanders, and hidalgos, of generous blood, were confined in the alcazaba, or citadel of Malaga, to await their ransom; and five hundred and seventy of the common soldiery were crowded in an enclosure or courtyard of the alcazaba, to be sold as slaves.

Great spoils were collected, of splendid armour and weapons taken from the slain, or thrown away by the cavaliers in their flight; and many horses magnificently caparisoned, together with numerous standards; all which were paraded in triumph into the Moorish towns.

The merchants, also, who had come with the army, intending to traffic in the spoils of the Moors, were themselves made objects of traffic. Several of them were driven like cattle before the Moorish viragos to the market of Malaga; and, in spite of all their adroitness in trade, and their attempts to buy themselves off at a cheap ransom, they were unable to purchase their freedom without such draughts upon their money-bags at home, as drained them to the very bottom.

AMERICAN HISTORY.

In many respects the history of North America differs from that of every other country, and in this difference it possesses an interest peculiar to itself, especially for those whose lot has been cast here, and who look back with a generous pride to the deeds of ancestors, by whom a nation's existence has been created, and a nation's glory adorned. We shall speak of this history, as divided into two periods, the Colonial, and the Revolutionary.

When we talk of the history of our country, we are not to be understood as alluding to any particular book, or to the labours of any man, or number of men, in treating this subject. If we have a few compilations of merit, embracing detached portions and limited periods, there is yet wanting a work, the writer of which shall undertake the task of plodding his way through all the materials, printed and in manuscript, and digesting them into a united, continuous, lucid, and philosophical whole, bearing the shape, and containing the substance of genuine history. No tempting encouragement, it is true, has been held out to such an enterprise. The absorbing present, in the midst of our stirring politics, and jarring party excitements, and bustling activity, has almost obliterated the past, or at least has left little leisure for pursuing the footsteps of the pilgrims, and the devious fortunes of our ancestors. The public taste has run in other directions, and no man of genius and industry has been found so courageous in his resolves, or prodigal of his labour, as to waste his life in digging into mines for treasures, which would cost him much, and avail little. But symptoms of a change are beginning to appear, which it may be hoped will ere long be realized.

And when the time shall come for illustrating this subject, it will be discovered, that there are rich stores of knowledge among the hidden and forgotten records of our colonial history; that the men of those days thought, and acted, and suffered with a wis

dom, a fortitude, and an endurance, which would add lustre to any age; and that they have transmitted an inheritance as honourable in the mode of its acquisition as it is dear to its present possessors. Notwithstanding the comparatively disconnected incidents in the history of this period, and the separate communities and governments to which it extends, it has nevertheless a unity and a consistency of parts, as well as copiousness of events, which make it a theme for the most gifted historian, and a study for every one who would enlarge his knowledge and profit by high example.

Unlike any other people, who have attained the rank of a nation, we may here trace our country's growth to the very elements of its origin, and consult the testimonies of reality, instead of the blind oracles of fable, and the legends of a dubious tradition. Besides a love of adventure, and an enthusiasm that surmounted every difficulty, the character of its founders was marked by a hardy enterprise and sturdiness of purpose, which carried them onward through perils and sufferings, that would have appalled weaker minds and less resolute hearts. This is the first great feature of resemblance in all the early settlers, whether they came to the north or to the south, and it merits notice from the influence it could not fail to exercise on their future acts and character, both domestic and political. The timid, the wavering, the feebleminded, the sons of indolence and ease, were not among those who left the comforts of home, braved the tempests of the ocean, and sought danger on the shores of an unknown and inhospitable world. Incited by various motives they might have been; by a fondness for adventure, curiosity, gain, or a dread of oppression; yet none but the bold, energetic, determined, persevering, would yield to these motives or any other.

Akin to these characteristics, and indeed a concomitant with them, was a spirit of freedom, and a restlessness under constraint. The New England settlers, we know, came away on this ground alone, goaded to a

sense of their invaded rights by the thorns of religious intolerance. But whatever motives may have operated, the prominent fact remains the same, and in this we may see throughout the colonies a uniform basis of that vigour of character, and indomitable love of liberty, which appeared ever afterwards, in one guise or another, whenever occasions called them out.

Hence it was, also, that the different colonies, although under dissimilar modes of government, some more and some less dependent on the crown, preserved a close resemblance in the spirit of their internal regulations, that spirit, or those principles, which entered deeply into the opinions of the people, and upon which their habits were formed.

Beginning everywhere in small bodies, elections implied almost a universal suffrage, and every individual became acquainted with his rights, and accustomed to use the power they gave him. Increase of numbers made no change in this respect. Charters were given and taken away, laws were annulled, and the King's judges decided against the colonial pretensions. The liberties of the mass were thus abridged, and the powers of legislation curtailed, but the people still went on, voting for their representatives and their municipal officers, and practising all the elementary acts of independent government; and the legislatures had new opportunities of asserting their rights before the world, studying them more deeply, watching over them more cautiously, and in this way gaining strength to their cause, through the agency of the very means that were employed to depress or destroy it. The primary elections were never reached by these oppressive measures of the supreme power, and, as they were founded on principles of close analogy in all the colonies, conformable to the circumstances of their origin, they were not only the guardian of the liberties of each, from its first foundation, but they became at last the cementing force, which bound them together, when a great and united effort was necessary.

Another element of unity in the colonial period was the fact of the colonists springing from the same stock; for although Holland, Germany and Sweden contributed a few settlers, yet the mass was of English origin, inheriting the free spirit that had been at work from the era of Runny Mead

downwards, in building up the best parts of the British Constitution, and framing laws to protect them. The Sidneys, and Miltons, and Lockes of England were teachers in America as well as in their native land, and more effectual, because their instructions fell in a readier soil, and sprang up with a livelier and bolder growth. The books of England were the fountains of knowledge in America, from which all parts drew equally, imbibing common habitudes of thought and opinion, and an intellectual uniformity. Our fathers soon saw, that the basis of virtue, the security of civil order and freedom, must be laid in the intelligence of the people. Schools were established and means provided, not everywhere with a zeal so ardent, and a forethought so judicious, as among the descendants of the pilgrims, but yet in all places according to their si tuation, and the tendency of controlling causes.

The colonial wars form another combining principle in the unity of that period, and furnish materials for vivid delineations of character and animated narrative. The English and French colonies were always doomed to espouse the quarrels and participate in the broils of their rival heads in Europe, who continued to nourish a root of bitterness, that left but few intervals of peace, and fewer still of harmonious feeling. When the fire of discord was kindled into open hostility, its flame soon reached America, and roused all hearts to the conflict. Louisburg and Nova Scotia, Lake George and Braddock's field, Oswego and Niagara, have witnessed the bravery of our ancestors, and the blood they expended, fighting the battles as well of transatlantic ambition as of selfdefence.

But there was a great moral cause at work in this train of events. By these trials, costly and severe as they were, the colonists were learning the extent of their physical resources, acting as one people, gaining the experience and nerving the sinews, that were at a future day to serve them in a mightier contest. Much blood was shed, but it was the price of future glory to their country; many a fair flower was cut off in the freshness of its bloom, many a sturdy oak was felled in the majesty of its strength, yet posterity will not forget the maxim of the Roman law, that they, who fall for their country, live in the immortality of their fame.

Next come the Indian wars, which commenced with the first landing of the pilgrim wanderers, and ceased not till the proud sons of the forest had melted away like an evening cloud, or disappeared in the remote solitudes of their own wildernesses. The wars of the Indians, their character and manners, their social and political condition, are original, having no prototype in any former time or race of men. They mingle in all the incidents of our colonial history, and stamp upon it an impression novel and peculiar.

With a strength of character and a reach of intellect, unknown in any other race of absolute savages, the Indian united many traits, some of them honourable and some degrading to humanity, which made him formidable in his enmity, faithless in his friendship, and at all times a dangerous neighbour: cruel, implacable, treacherous, yet not without a few of the better qualities of the heart and the head; a being of contrasts, violent in his passions, hasty in his anger, fixed in his revenge, yet cool in counsel, seldom betraying his plighted honour, hospitable, sometimes generous. A few names have stood out among them, which, with the culture of civilization, might have been shining stars on the lists of recorded fame. Philip, Pondiac, Sassacus, if the genius of another Homer were to embalm their memory, might rival the Hectors and Agamemnons of heroic renown, scarcely less savage, not less sagacious or brave.

Indian eloquence, if it did not flow with the richness of Nestor's wisdom, or burn with Achilles' fire, spoke in the deep strong tones of nature, and resounded from the chords of truth. The answer of the Iroquois chief to the French, who wished to purchase his lands, and push him farther into the wilderness, Voltaire has pronounced superior to any sayings of the great men commemorated by Plutarch. We were born on this spot; our fathers were buried here. Shall we say to the bones of our fathers, arise, and go with us into a strange land?"

But more has been said of their figurative language, than seems to be justified by modern experience. Writers of fiction have distorted the Indian character, and given us any thing but originals. Their fancy has produced sentimental Indians, a kind of beings that never existed in reality; and Indians clothing their ideas in the gorgeous

imagery of external nature, which they had neither the refinement to conceive, nor words to express. In truth, when we have lighted the pipe of concord, kindled or extinguished a council fire, buried the bloody hatchet, sat down under the tree of peace with its spreading branches, and brightened the chain of friendship, we have nearly exhausted their flowers of rhetoric. But the imagery prompted by internal emotion, and not by the visible world, the eloquence of condensed thought and pointed expression, the eloquence of a diction extremely limited in its forms, but nervous and direct, the eloquence of truth unadorned and of justice undisguised, these are often found in Indian speeches, and constitute their chief characteristic.

It should, moreover, be said for the Indians, that, like the Carthaginians, their history has been written by their enemies. The tales of their wrongs and their achievements may have been told by the warriorchiefs to stimulate the courage, and perpetuate the revenge of their children, but they were traces in the sand; they perished in a day, and their memory is gone.

Such are the outlines of our colonial history, which constitute its unity, and make it a topic worthy to be illustrated by the labours of industry and talent. The details, if less imposing, are copious and varied. The progress of society developing itself in new modes, at first in isolated communities scattered along the sea-coast, and then gradually approximating each other, extending to the interior, subduing the forests with a magic almost rivalling the lyre of Orpheus, and encountering everywhere the ferocity of uncivilized man; the plans of social government necessarily suggested by such a state of things, and their operations in the advancing stages of improvement and change; the fantastic codes of laws, and corresponding habitudes, that sprang from the reveries of our Puritan fathers; the admirable systems which followed them, conceived by men tutored only in the school of freedom and necessity, exceeding in political wisdom and security of rights the boasted schemes of ancient lawgivers: the wild and disorganizing frenzies of religious fanaticism; the misguided severities of religious intolerance; the strange aberrations of the human mind, and abuses of power, in abetting the criminal folly of witchcraft; the struggles, that were ever going on, between the Governors and

the Assemblies, the former urging the demands of prerogative, the latter maintaining the claims of liberty; the sources of growing wealth; the influence of knowledge widely diffused, of religion unshakled by the trammeis of power; the manners and habits of the people at different times and in different places, taking their hue from such a combination of causes; these, and a thousand other features deeply interesting and full of variety, belong to the portraiture of colonial history, giving symmetry to its parts, and completeness to the whole.

The Revolutionary period, like the Colonial, has hitherto been but imperfectly elucidated, and perhaps for the same reason. The voluminous materials, printed and unprinted, widely scattered in this country and in Europe, some obvious and well known, many unexplored, have been formidable obstacles to the execution of such an undertaking. No Rymers have yet appeared among us, who were willing to spend a life in gathering up and embodying these memorials; and, till public encouragement shall prompt and aid such a design, till the national representatives shall have leisure to pause for a moment from their weighty cares in adjusting the wheels of state, and emulate the munificent patriotism of other governments, by adopting measures to collect and preserve the perishing records of the wisdom and valour of their fathers; till this shall be done, the historian of the Revolution must labour under disadvantages, which his zeal will hardly stimulate him to encounter, nor his genius enable him to surmount.

The subject itself is one of the best that ever employed the pen of the writer, whether considered in the object at stake, the series of acts by which it was accomplished, or its consequences. It properly includes a compass of twenty years, extending from the close of the French war in America to the general peace at Paris. The best history in existence, though left unfinished, that of the Peloponnesian war, by Thucydides, embraces exactly the same space of time, and is not dissimilar in the details of its events. The revolutionary period, thus defined, is rounded with epic exactness, having a beginning, a middle, and an end; a time for causes to operate, for the stir of action, and for the final results.

The machinery in motion is on the broadest scale of grandeur. We see the new

world, young in age, but resolute in youth, lifting up the arm of defiance against the haughtiest power of the old; fleets and armies, on one side, crossing the ocean in daring attitude and confiding strength; on the other, men rallying round the banner of union, and fighting on their natal soil for freedom, rights, existence; the long struggle and successful issue; hope confirmed, justice triumphant. The passions are likewise here at work, in all the changing scenes of politics and war, in the deliberations of the senate, the popular mind, and the martial excitements of the field. We have eloquence and deep thought in counsel, alertness and bravery in action, self-sacrifice, fortitude, and patient suffering of hardships through toil and danger to the last. If we search for the habiliments of dignity with which to clothe a historical subject, or the looser drapery of ornament with which to embellish a narrative, where shall we find them thronging more thickly, or in happier contrasts, than during this period?

The causes of the revolution, so fertile a theme of speculation, are less definite than have been imagined. The whole series of colonial events was a continued and accumulating cause. The spirit was kindled in England; it went with Robinson's congregation to Holland; it landed with them at Plymouth; it was the basis of the first constitution of the sage and self-taught legislators; it never left them nor their descendants. It extended to the other colonies, where it met with a kindred impulse, was nourished in every breast, and became rooted in the feelings of the whole people.

The revolution was a change of forms, but not of substance; the breaking of a tie, but not the creation of a principle; the establishment of an independent nation, but not the origin of its intrinsic political capacities. The foundations of society, although unsettled for the moment, were not essentially disturbed; its pillars were shaken, but never overthrown. The convulsions of war subsided, and the people found themselves, in their local relations and customs, their immediate privileges and enjoyments, just where they had been at the beginning. The new forms transferred the supreme authority from the King and Parliament of Great Britain to the hands of the people. This was a gain, but not a renovation; a security against future encroachments, but