tween the broken, deeply-divided, and well-watered surface of Europe, and the broad plains, vast mountain ranges, and few, but mighty rivers, which form the characteristic features of Asia. In North America, we see a land of singularly varied surface, in its primitive state, covered with forest; with an uncertain climate; a soil seldom luxuriant, often sterile, every where requiring, and generally rewarding human industry; watered by many rivers, penetrated in almost every direction by navigable streams, and traversed from north to south, an unusual direction for rivers, by an immense stream, the Mississippi, bringing down the furs, the produce of the north, the corn of the temperate zone, the fruits of the tropics, and connecting all those regions with the commerce of Europe: a natural canal, of more than two thousand miles, without a perceptible difference of breadth, from New Orleans to the falls of St Anthony. The Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, noble rivers, traverse the land in a variety of directions, with courses of from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles; and to the north of the United States, a chain of vast inland seas, a succession of Mediterraneans, surrounded by productive provinces, rapidly filling with a busy population. The southern portion of the New World exhibits the plains of Tartary, the solitary mountain range of India, the fertility of the Asiatic soil. It, too, has its Ganges and its Indus, in the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata; but its smaller streams are few and feeble. It has the fiery heat of India, the dangerous exhalations of the jungle, the tiger and the lion, though of a less daring and powerful species; and the native, dark, delicate, timid, and indolent, as the Hindoo. Without speaking of the contrast as perfectly sustained in all its points, it is unquestionable that North and South America have been formed for two great families of humankind as distinct as energy and ease; that the North is to be possessed only as the conquest of toil, while the South allows of the languor into whose hand the fruit drops from the tree. May it not also be rationally conjectured, that in the discovery Europe and America were equally the objects of the Providential benevolence? It was palpably the Divine will to give Europe a new and powerful_advance in the fifteenth century. Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass, were its gifts to Europe; to be followed and consummated in that new impulse at once to religious truth and to social improvement, which so soon transpired in the German Reformation, and in the commercial system of England and the continental nations. The extension of this mighty impulse to America rapidly followed. The first English colony was planted in North America in the reign of Elizabeth, the great protectress of Protestantism; and the first authentic knowledge of South America was brought to Europe by the discoveries of Englishmen, following the route of Columbus, and going beyond him. It is true that the intercourse of the South with the energetic qualities and free principles of Europe was impeded by an influence which, from its first being, has been hostile to the free progress of the human mind. The Popedom threw its shadow over Spanish America, and the great experiment of civilisation was comparatively thrown away wherever the priest of Rome was paramount. The land, too, witnessed a succession of slaughters, and the still more fearful trade in the unfortunate natives of Africa. But the most powerful contrast was furnished to mankind in the rapid growth of the Protestant states of the north, in their increasing commerce, in the vigour of their laws, in the activity of the public mind, and the ascent of their scattered and feeble communities into the rank and the enjoyments of a great nation. Nor are we to speak of South America as having wholly slept during the period since its discovery. If all the larger faculties which give nations a place in history remained in a state of collapse under the pressure of Spain, society had made a forward step in every province of that great territory. The inhabitants had never relapsed into their primitive barbarism; they had laws, commerce, manufactures, and literature, all in a ruder degree than as developed under the vivid activity of Europe, but all raising the provinces into a gradual capacity of social vigour, of popular civilisation, and perhaps even of that pure religion without which national MAN must be content to follow the steps of Providence tardily, timidly, and uncertainly; but he can have no pursuit more worthy of his genius, his wisdom, or his virtue. Why one half of the globe remained hidden from the other during the four or five thousand years after its creation, is among the questions which we may long__ask without obtaining an answer. Why the treasures, the plants, and the animals of America should have been utterly unknown, alike to the adventurous expeditions of Tyre and Sidon, to the nautical skill of the Carthaginian, to the brilliant curiosity of the Greek, and to the imperial ambition of the Roman; while their discovery was reserved for a Genoese sailor in the fifteenth century, is a problem perhaps inaccessible of solution by any human insight into the ways of the Great Disposer of all things. Yet may it not be conjectured that the knowledge was expressly withheld until it could be of practical use to mankind; that if America had been discovered a thousand years before, it would have been found only a vast wilderness in both its southern and northern divisions, for it was then almost wholly unpeopled; that with the chief interest of imperial Rome turned to European possession or Eastern conquest, the discovery would have been nearly thrown away; that there was hitherto no superflux of European population to pour into this magnificent desert; and that even if Roman adventure had dared the terrors of the ocean, and the perils of VOL. LX. No. CCCLXXI. new climates, at an almost interminable distance from home, the massacres and plunders habitual to heathen conquest must have impeded, if not wholly broken up, the progress of the feeble population already settling on the soil; or perhaps trained that population to habits of ferocity like their own, and turned a peaceful and pastoral land into a scene of slaughter and misery? The discovery of the American Continent flashed on the world like the discovery of a new Creation. In reading the correspondence of the learned at the time, the return of Columbus, and the knowledge which that return brought, is spoken of with a rapture of language more resembling an Arabian tale than the narrative of the most adventurous voyage of man. The primitive races of their fellowbeings, living in the simplicity of nature, under forests of the palm, with all delicious fruits for their food, with gold and pearls for their toys, and the rich treasures of new plants and animals of all species for their indulgence and their use, were described with the astonishment and delight of a dream of Fairy-land, or the still richer visions of restored Paradise. Yet, when the hues of imagination grew colourless by time, the continents of the West displayed to the ripened knowledge of Europe virtues only still more substantial. The contrast between the northern and southern portions of the New World is of the most striking kind. It is scarcely less marked than the distinction be 6 Cruz is as sad as a dungeon, as silent as a monastery, and as sickly as an bospital. The señoras, a race of perfectly Spanish-visaged, black-eyed, and very coquettish beauties, sit all day drooping in their balconies, like doves upon the housetops, perhaps longing for a hurricane, an earthquake, or any thing which may break up the monotony of their existence. The sound of a guitar, a passing footstep, nay, the whine of a beggar, sets a whole street in motion, and there is a general rustling of mantillas, and a general rush to the windows. The men bear their calamity better; the señor, when he has once a cigar between his sallow lips, has made up his mind for the day. Whether he stands in the sunshine or sits in the shade-whether he wakes or sleeps, the cigar serves him for all the exercise of his animal functions. His brain is as much enveloped in smoke as his moustaches; his cares vanish like the smoke itself. It is not until his cigar-box is empty, that he reverts to the consciousness of his being an inhabitant of this world of ours. But some are of a more aspiring disposition. They now and then glance round upon the noble landscape which encircles their city. But they do this with the most dexterous determination not to move a limb. Their houses are flat-roofed; some of them have little glazed chambers on the roofs; and there they sit with the sky above them, the mountains round them, and the sea beneath them, dreaming away like so many dormice. One of their American describers compares the whole wellbred population to a colony of beavers; but, we presume, without the industry of the quadruped. Their still closer resemblance would be to a wax-work collection on a large scale, where tinsel petticoats, woollen wigs, and bugle eyes imitate humanity, and every thing is before the spectator but life. Jonathan, who thinks himself born to lay hold on every scrap of the globe by which he can turn one cent into two, looks, of course, on the whole shore of the gulf-towns, mines, and mountains-as his own. He frees himself from all scruples on the subject by the obvious convenience of the conception. "No spot of the earth," says one of those neighbourly persons, "will be more desirable than the soil of Mexico for a residence, whenever it is in possession of our race, with the government and laws which they carry with them wherever they go, The march of time is not more certain than that this will be, and probably at no distant day." 17 And, on this showing, the man of government and laws" proceeds to "sink, burn, and destroy," in the great cause of humanity," edifies the native by grapeshot, and polishes him with the cutlass. In those exploits of a "free and enlightened people, our only surprise is that diplomacy itself takes the trouble of offering any apology whatever. The comparative powers of resistance and attack settle the conscience of the affair in a word. The seizure is easy, and therefore why should it not be made? The riflemen of Kentucky and the hunters of Virginia, the squatters of Ohio and the sympathizers of Massachusets, all see the affair in the proper light; and why should the philosopher or the philanthropist, the man of justice or the man of religion, be listened to on subjects so much more easily settled by the rattle of twelve-pounders ? The right of making war on Mexico. has not yet found a single defender but in the streets; not a single ground of defence but in the roar of the rabble; not a single plea but in the con venience of the possession. Even the American journals have given up their old half-savage rant of universal conquest. Every drop of blood shed in a war of aggression is sure to be avenged. The present town is not the town of Cortes. His "Villa Rica de Vera Cruz" (The Rich City of the True Cross) was seated six miles further inland. But trade decided against the choice of the great soldier. The pen, in this instance, conquered the sword a century before the conflict began in Europe. The population of the old city slipped away to the new and hasty hovels on the shore; and the ground consecrated by the banner of the Spanish hero was left to the donkey and the thistle. The visible protector of the city and harbour (it has saints innumerable) is the island of St Juan de Ulloa, lying within 600 yards of the mole; and on which stands the well-known fortress. Ships, of course, pass immediately under its guns; and it is regarded as the most powerful fortress in Mexico, or perhaps in the New World, being now thoroughly armed. This is a different state of things from the condition in which it was found by the French squadron in 1839. The ramparts were then scarcely mounted, the guns were more dangerous to the garrison than to the enemy, and of regular artillerists there were few or none; engineers were unheard of. The French naturally did as they pleased; achieved a magnanimous triumph over bare walls, and plucked a laurel for the Prince de Joinville from the most barren of all possible soils of victory; but it served for a bulletin. They would probably now find another kind of reception, for the ramparts have guns, and the guns have artillerymen. The aspect of the Mexican coast from the sea is singularly bold. On the north and west the waters of the Gulf wash a level shore; but on the south all is a crescent of mountains, rising to a general height of 12,000 feet above the level of the sea; but the noblest object is the snow-capped pinnacle of Orizaba, rising, according to Humboldt, 17,400 feet, and covered with perpetual snow from the height of 15,092. This is a volcanic mountain, but which has slept since the middle of the sixteenth century; what must have been its magnificence when its summit was covered with flame! The mode of conveyance between Vera Cruz and Mexico is chiefly by an establishment of stage-coaches, making three journeys a-week between the capitals. Those vehicles, originally established by an American of the United States, are now the property of a Mexican whom they are rapidly making rich. The horses are Mexican, and, though small, are strong and spirited. The stage leaves Vera Cruz at eleven at night, and arrives about three o'clock in the next afternoon at Jalapa, a distance of about seventy miles, and a continual ascent through mountains. The houses on the wayside are few and wretched, constructed of canes ten feet long, fixed in the ground, and covered with palm-tree leaves. The villages strongly resemble those of the American Indians; hovels ten or twelve feet square, with a small patch of ground for Chillies and Indian corn-the only difference of those original styles of architecture being, that the northern builds with logs, the southern with mud in the shape of bricks. A large portion of the country be-tween those two towns belonged to the well-known General Santa Anna. The soil of his vast estate is fertile, but left to its natural fertility-the General being a shepherd, and said to have from forty to fifty thousand head of cattle in his pastures. He also acts the farmer, and takes in cattle to graze. His demand is certainly not high; and Yorkshire will be asto nished to hear that he feeds them at forty dollars the hundred. The ascent of the mountain range, and the varieties of the road, naturally keep the traveller on the qua vive. With the air singularly transparent, with the brightest of skies above, and the most varied of southern landscapes stretching to an unlimited extent below, the eye finds a continual feast. The city of Jalapa stands on the slope, throned on a shelf of the mountain 4000 feet above the sea, and with 4000 feet of the bold and sunny range above it. The whole horizon, except in the direction of Vera Cruz, is a circle of mountains, and towering above them all, at a distance of twenty-five miles, (which, from the clearness of the air, seems scarcely the fourth part of the distance, rises the splendid cone of Orizaba. On the summit of the range stands Perote, a town connected with a strong fortress, perhaps the highest in position that the world exhibits-8500 feet above the shore. Height makes the difference detween heat and cold every where. In the middle of a summer which burns the blood in the human frame at Vera Cruz, men in Perote button their coat3to the chin, and sleep in blankets. Thus winter is brought from the Poles to the Tropic, and the Mexican shivers under the most fiery sunshine of the globe. The next stage is Puebla-eighty |