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past labour, even to blood, had been in vain. Cut to the soul, with a wounded spirit, he still showed himself an extraordinary and eccentric man. He left forever the state in which he had been the first to introduce a civilized population-where he had so boldly maintained himself against external attacks, and shown himself such an industrious and exemplary citizen; where he found no white man when he sat himself down amid the ancient woods, and left behind him half a million. He forsook it forever; no intreaty could keep him within its bounds. Man, from whom he deserved every thing, had persecuted and robbed him of all. He bade his friends and his family adieu for ever; he felt the tie which linked him to social life was broken. He took with him his rifle and a few necessaries, and crossing the Ohio, pursued his track till he was two or three hundred miles in advance of any white settlement. As the territory north of the Ohio was taken possession of, and peopling fast from the United States, he crossed the Mississippi, and plunged into the unknown and immense country on the banks of the Missouri, where the monstrous Mammoth is even now supposed to be in existence. On the shores of this mighty river he reared his rude log hut, to which he attached no idea of permanency, but held himself constantly ready to retire yet farther from civilized man, should he approach too near his desert solitude. With the exception of a son, who resided with his father, according to some accounts, but without any one, according to others, his dog and gun were his only companions. He planted the seeds of few esculent vegetables round his fragile dwelling, but his principal food he obtained by hunting. He has been seen seated on a log at the entrance of his hut by an exploring traveller, or far more frequently by the straggling Indian. His rifle generally lay across his knees and his dog at his side, and he rarely went farther from home than the haunts of the deer and the wild turkey, which constituted his principal support. In his solitude he would sometimes speak of his past actions, and of his indefatigable labours, with a glow of delight on his countenance that indicated how dear they were to his heart, and would then become at once silent and dejected. He would survey his limbs, look at his shrivelled hands, complain of the dimness of his sight, and lifting the rifle to his shoulder take aim at a distant object, and say that it trembled before his vision, that his eyes were losing their power, rubbing them with his hands, and lamenting that his youth and manhood were gone, but hoping his legs would serve him to the last of life, to carry him to spots frequented by the game, that he might not starve. It does not appear that he talked much of the ingratitude of mankind towards him. He perhaps thought regret and complaint alike unavailing, and that his resolution of exiling himself in the back woods and the territories of the Indians was the best way of demonstrating the high-spirited contempt and indignation he felt towards his countrymen, by whom he had been so unjustly treated. Boon seems to have possessed a great mind; congregated men had treated him with injustice and with cruelty, considering his claims upon them; he sought not to retaliate his injuries on individuals he felt not the passion of revenge, nor the wish to injure those who had injured him irreparably, but he viewed social man with the scorn of ill-requited merit, and he determined to withdraw from his power. He felt that he could not be happy amid the heart

less vices of society; that the desert and the forest, the Indian, the rattlesnake, and the Juagar, were preferable associates; that they bore no feigned aspect of kindness while they were secretly plotting his destruction; that they rarely inflicted evil without just provocation; and that the uncontrolled child of Nature was a preferable companion to the executors of laws, which to him at least, however beneficial they might in some cases be to others, were most cruel and unjust.

Thus he passed through life till he was between eighty and ninety years of age, contented in his wild solitude, and in his security from injustice and rapacity. About a twelvemonth ago, it is reported, he was found dead on his knees, with his rifle cocked and resting on the trunk of a fallen tree, as if he had just been going to take aim, most probably at a deer, when death suddenly terminated his earthly recollections of the ingratitude of his fellow-creatures, at a period when his faculties, though he had attained such an age, were not greatly impaired. Boonsborough is now a thriving town, and its name will ever remain as a testimony of its founder's sufferings, and the conduct of his fellowcitizens towards him, in the midst of the freest nation of ancient or modern times. Y. I.

THE LOST PLEIAD.

"Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below."-LORD BYRON.

AND is there glory from the Heavens departed?
-Oh, void unmark'd!-thy sisters of the sky
Still hold their place on high,

Though from its rank thine orb so long hath started,
Thou! that no more art seen of mortal eye!

Hath the Night lost a gem, the regal Night?
-She wears her crown of old magnificence,
Though thou art exiled thence!

No desert seems to part those urns of light,
Midst the far depths of purple gloom intense.

They rise in joy, the starry myriads burning!
The Shepherd greets them on his mountains free,
And from the silvery sea

To them the Sailor's wakeful eye is turning;

-Unchang'd they rise, they have not mourn'd for thee!

Couldst thou be shaken from thy radiant place,
Ev'n as a dew-drop from the myrtle-spray,
Swept by the wind away?

Wert thou not peopled by some glorious race,

And was there power to smite them with decay?

Why, who shall talk of Thrones, of Sceptres riven?
-It is too sad to think on what we are,

When from its height afar,

A world sinks thus! and yon majestic Heaven
Shines not the less for that one vanish'd star!

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THE PROGRESS OF COXCOMBRY.

"Nemo repente fuit dandissimus."

THE transformation of the chrysalis into the butterfly is not more complete or surprising than that of the slovenly schoolboy into the finished civil, academic, or military dandy. The last metamorphosis is, however, more gradual than the former. The nice observer can easily mark the successive stages of its developement, from the superstitious tie of the cravat and scrupulous "brushing of the hat o'mornings," to the minute observance of the entire ceremonial of foppery, and faithful discharge of the whole duty of dandyism.

The passion for dress is, generally speaking, stronger in the fair sex than in ours, and is in them infinitely more excusable. But when it has once thoroughly laid hold of an unlucky wight, it carries him into much greater and more ridiculous excesses than we ever witness among the ladies. Dandyism, at first, is like the small speck in the cloudless azure, which to the eye of the experienced mariner presages the gathering storm. In its birth it is scarcely noticed by common observers, or noticed only to be despised. But it gradually increases by fresh accessions of vapour, until the intellectual horizon becomes completely overcast, and the sun of reason

"from far peeps with a sickly face,

Too weak the clouds and mighty fogs to chase."

The late Hugh Peters was a striking instance of how far the genuine dandymania could carry a man, who in other respects was not destitute of natural good sense. In Hugh, indeed, this disease appeared to be constitutional; he evinced evident symptoms of it at a very early age, and it continued with increasing violence to his dying day. This master-passion was not to be controlled by sickness, poverty, imprisonment or exile. It burned with as much fervour in age as in youth, and was scarcely extinguished by that universal damperdeath.

Hugh, as I have said, began dandyism at an early age. His parents were "of the straitest sect," Methodists. They, of course, reprobated all vain adornment of the outward man, considering the gauds of dress as the ensigns of Satan, and so many badges of subjection to the kingdom of darkness. They were careful that Hugh should be arrayed with the utmost plainness, in clothes of the coarsest texture, and the most ungainly fashion. The style of his habiliments was singularly ludicrous, and afforded infinite diversion to his young companions. Instead of being dressed in the fashion of boys of his own age and rank, he was attired like an old man. He usually wore a blue coat with covered buttons, which fitted him like a sentry-box, and exhibited a latitude of skirt that would have done honour to George Fox himself. You would swear that he had been measured by the tailors of Laputa, or the ingenious artist who works from hasty observations taken on the body of M. Rothschild, during its transit to the Stock-Exchange. His waistcoat was of a sober brown, with pocket-flaps "five fathom deep," that overhung a pair of scanty corduroy inexpressibles, scarce of his knee. Grey yarn stockings, shoes, or rather

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brogues, two inches in the sole, and a broad-brimmed hat, completed the exterior of the elegant Hugh Peters.

The system pursued by his parents produced an effect diametrically opposite to their intention. It turned the boy's regard to the subject of dress, and generated and fostered the desire of decoration. He ventured, as he grew older, though with a trembling hand, to make some slight reform in his costume. He disfranchised his enormous coatflaps, and succeeded in cancelling a few sinecure pockets. This he managed by cultivating a good understanding with his tailor. But all his efforts were fruitless, to oblige his corduroy breeches to vacate their seat, or to prevent the annual return of the broad-brimmed beaver to the presidency of his pericranium. He managed, however, to procure a pair of buff leather-gaiters as a counterbalance to the corrupt influence of the one, and in some degree to alter the constitution of the other, by cocking it up at the sides with black pins; a measure, which would have rendered him a prime favourite at the Court of St. Petersburgh, when Paul, the hater of round hats was autocrat of all the Russias.

It is not to be imagined that even these changes were effected without considerable opposition: in fact, they gave birth to continual explosions of present wrath, and fulminations of wrath to come, on the part of his father. His mother, too, added her mite of zeal in predicting the eventual perdition of her only son; for who, as she acutely remarked, could escape hell-fire, that wore a cocked hat and sulphurcoloured gaiters? But Hugh had arrived at that age and stature where flagellation ceases to be practicable and exhortation to be efficient. His parents could not succeed

"with wind

Of airy threats to awe, whom now with deeds

They could not."

Their only resource was to deprive him altogether of money; and though this could not wither his dandyism in the bud, it yet checked its growth for a season, and imparted to it a stunted character of original and ludicrous peculiarity.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and some of Hugh's devices at this period to put off the clown and put on the dandy were sufficiently ingenious, though often productive of ridiculous results. He turned tailor in his own defence, but his earlier attempts to modify his habiliments, were, like the infant efforts of every art, rude and clumsy to a degree. He reduced the latitude of his skirts without any very strict observance of mathematical proportion, and finished his work with no particular neatness of stitching. The partial alterations in his dress, harmonized very ill with its general character, and often exhibited the most ridiculous contrasts. The flaming gaiters, for instance, were not well assorted with the clumsy shoes and corduroy-breeches deeply bronzed by the relentless finger of time. The tail of his coat, cropped short by his rash hand in evil hour, gave to the otherwise too ample garment, something of the look of a fireman's jacket destitute of the badge and made by a most ill-conditioned tailor. A red waistcoat, second-hand, trimmed with old fur, and, in the fashion of the day, ridiculously short, which he purchased of an honest Israelite, seemed

within the prodigious lappels of his external habit, like a flea in St. Paul's, or Gulliver in the embraces of Glumdalclitch. His neck enveloped in muslin manifold, rose above his humble collar, "like the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus." But an invention which he hit on, for the decoration of his nether limbs, was indeed a chef-d'œuvre. Entertaining a high opinion of the symmetry of this part of his person, he longed to reveal its graceful proportions in the seductive transparencies of stocking-web. His uncle, who was something of a dandy, gave him an opportunity of gratifying this penchant by the present of a pair of cast-off tights. These, though somewhat large, Hugh contrived, by his sartorial dexterity, to adapt tolerably well to his own person. But on trying them on, though highly gratified by the contemplation of the femur and tibia, he found that something was still wanting to the perfection of their developement. Our desires increase with our possessions, and every new gratification gives birth to a fresh necessity. Hugh soon discovered that tight pantaloons without Hessian boots were as preposterous as a haunch of venison without currant-jelly, or a leg of pork without peas-pudding. They were, in truth, natural correlatives, coefficient quantities, mutually attractive, conductors to each other, their separation was violent, dangerous, improper, sacrilegious! But how to effect the desired union ? Boots were dear, Hugh was poor; his uncle had no Hessians to spare, and his father's heart and purse were equally closed against him. He must either wear the pantaloons without boots (a thing not to be thought of) or steal a pair. Dire dilemma! diabolical alternative! But the genius of dandyism descended kindly to his aid, and opportunely rescued her ardent votary from the hazard of crime and the mortification of disappointment. As Hugh cast around

"His baleful eyes,

That witness'd huge affliction and dismay,"

he suddenly espied his buff-leather gaiters, which hung upon a peg above his head. An idea flashed across his brain like lightning-one of those felicitous conceptions of genius, perfect as if matured by years of thought, sudden as inspiration! He seized the gaiters, posted to a cobler, had them cut out into the shape of Hessian boots at top, blackened, polished, decked with tassels. What need of more words? Nothing could be more complete. The following day was Sunday. He appeared at church in complete costume,-cocked chapeau, pudding-cravat, red waistcoat, fireman's jacket, brown-coloured tights, and gaiter-boots, the admiration of himself the derision of many-the astonishment of all!

But the hour was at hand when Hugh was to cast his slough, to unfold his glittering scales in the sunbeam, to burst the dark prison of his chrysalis for ever, and issue forth an airy butterfly in all the colours of the rainbow. His father, who was much more sincerely devoted to Mammon than to God, undertook a voyage to Smyrna in quest of gain. The prince of air, who thought it high time to appropriate his destined prey, raised a storm and plunged the Methodistic merchant in the deep. Hugh was sole heir of all his wealth, which was considerable, and as the trustees of the property did not pretend to VOL. VI. No. 36.--1823.

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