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found no cause of disappoint-lain-millions a hero!!" Napoleon ment, or fear, until I read your and Wellington are heroes. !! Ed.] account of that "invisible being," HOSPITAL SCENE IN PORTUGAL. called Ariel, and I declare I have From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. not enjoyed one moment's tranThe French army had long suffered terqullity since. What! does that rible privations. We all knew that Mascreature hear every thing I say? sena could not much longer retain his position, and the "Great Lord," (so the I have scarcely dared to speak Spaniards all call Wellington,) allowed fasince I heard of him. I used, at mine to do the work of a charge of bayonevening parties, tea-parties, and every where else, to rattle and gabble away like every thing. used to slander the gentlemen, and slander ladies, with whose real characters I had no acquaintance; and I am frightened almost to death to think that he has told you every word " as he heard it." hope you will not put it down in your "Papers ;" and I solemnly " I never declare, if you will not will do so again."

MARIA.

I

ets. Our army was weary of the lines. It felt as if cooped up by an enemy it yet despised, and would have gladly marched out to storm the formidable French encampment; and such was the first idea that struck many of us, when, on the 5th of March, the army was put in motion, and the animating music of the regimental bands, rung through the rocky ridges of ally understood that the French were in Torres Vedras. But it was soon univerfull retreat; there was now no hope of a great pitched battle, and all that I could expect, was that as our army formed part of the advance, we might now and then have a brush with the rear guard of the French, which was, you know, composed of the flower of the army, and commanded by Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave."

The Social Companion assures I will give you, in another letter, an acthe candid and ingenuous Maria, count of the most striking scenes I witnessthat she shall not be exposed, if ed during the pursuit after our ferocious enemy. They had been cheated out of a she will keep her vow; and ex-victory over us, (so they said, and so in ercise her fine talents, in advan-Gallic presumption they probably felt,) cing the happiness, rather than when, some months before, Massena bethe miseries of her associates.

P.

[The reader of the following pathetic description, while his horrour will be excited at the awful ravages of war-while he will execrate that diabolical ambition, which leads crowned heads to make victims of their innocent subjects; he will turn, with rapturous joy to our beloved Republic, where the sword is never drawn but in the defence of our Liberties, and in the support of our Rights" One murder makes a vil

held that army which he threatened to drive into the sea, frowning on him from impregnable heights, all bristling with cannon. Instead of battle, and conquest, and triumph, they had long remained in hopeless inactivity, and at last their convoys being interrupted by the guerillas, they had endured all the intensest miseries of famine. Accordingly when they broke up, the soul of the French army was in a burning fever of savage wrath. The consummate skill of their leaders, and unmitigated severity of their discipline, kept the troops in firm and regular order; and certainly on all occasions, when I had an opportunity of seeing the rear guard, its move

ments were most beautiful.

I could not

help admiring the mass moving slowly away like a multitude of demons, all obeying the beral in thus speaking of our foe. Wait till signs of one master spirit. Call me not illiyou have heard from me a detailed account

of their merciless butcheries, and then you | laugh-You will find, said she, no body will admit that a true knight violates not there to disturb you. the laws of chivalry, in uttering his abhor- I followed her advice with a kind of surence of blood thirsty barbarians. The perstitious acquiescence. There was no ditches were often literally filled with clot- reason to anticipate any adventure or danted and coagulated blood, as with mire-ger in the convent; yet the wild eyes, and the bodies of peasants, put to death like the wilder voice of the old crone, powerdogs, were lying there horribly mangled- fully affected me, and though, after all, she little naked infants, of a year old or was only such an old woman as one may less, were found besmeared in the mud of see any where, I really began to invest her the road transfixed with bayonet wounds with many imposing qualities, till I found, and in one instance, a child of about a that in a sort of reverie, I had walked up month old, I myself saw with the bayonet a pretty long flight of steps, and was standleft sticking in its neck-young women ing at the entrance to the cloister of the and matrons were found lying dead with convent. I then saw something that made cruel and shameful wounds; and as if some me speedily forget the old woman, though general law to that effect had been pro- what it was I did see, I could not in the mulgated to the army, the priests were first moments of my amazement and horhanged upon trees by the road side. But rour, very distinctly comprehend. no more of this at present.

Above a hundred dead bodies lay and I wish now to give you some idea of a sat before my eyes, all of them apparently scene I witnessed at Miranda de Cervo, on in the very attitude or posture in which the 9th day of our pursuit. Yet I fear they had died. I looked at them at least, that a sight so terrible cannot be shadow- a minute before I knew that they were all ed out, except in the memory of him who corpses. Something in the mortal silence beheld it. I entered the town about dusk. of the place told me that I alone was alive It had been a black, grim, and gloomy sort in this dreadful company. A desperate of a day-at one time fierce blasts of wind, courage enabled me then to look steadfastly and at another perfect stillness, with far at the scene before me. The bodies were off thunder. Altogether, there was a wild mostly clothed in mats and rugs and tatadaptation of the weather and the day to tered great coats; some of them merely the retreat of a great army. Huge masses wrapped round about with girdles of straw, of clouds lay motionless on the sky before and two or three perfectly naked. Every us; and then they would break up sud- face had a different expression-but all denly as with a whirlwind, and roll off in painful, horrid, agonized, bloodless. Many the red and bloody distance. I felt myself glazed eyes were wide open; and perhaps towards the fall of the evening in a state of this was the most shocking thing in the strange excitement. My imagination whole spectacle. So many eyes that saw got the better entirely of all my other fa- not, all seemingly fixed on different obculties, and I was like a man in a grand jects; some cast up to Heaven, some but terrific dream, who never thinks of questioning any thing he sees or hears, but believes all the phantoms around, with a strength of belief seemingly proportional to their utter dissimilarity to the subjects of the real world of nature.

looking straight forward, and some with the white orbs turned round, and deep sunk in the sockets---it was a sort of hospital. These wretched beings were mostly all desperately or mortally wounded; and after having been stripped by their comrades, they had been left there dead, and to die. Such were they, who, as the old hag said, would not trouble me.

Just as I was passing the great cross in the principal street, I met an old haggard looking wretch-a woman, who seemed to have in her hollow eyes an unaccountable I had began to view this ghastly sight expression of cruelty-a glance like that with some composure, when I saw at the of madness, but her deportment was quiet remotest part of the hospital, a gigantic and moral, and she was evidently of the figure, sitting covered with blood and almiddle rank of society, though her dress most naked, upon a rude bedstead, with was faded and squalid She told me (in his back leaning against the wall, and his broken English,) that I would find comfor- eyes fixed directly on mine. I thought he table accommodation in an old convent was alive, and shuddered; but he was that stood at some distance among a grove stone dead. In the last agonies he had of cork trees; pointing to them, at the bitten his under lip almost entirely off, and same time, with her long shrivelled hand his long black beard was drenched in clotand arm, and giving a sort of hysterical ted gore, that likewise lay in large blots on

his shaggy bosom. I recognized the corpse. I loathsome, terrible, ghostlike. Human He was a sergeant in a grenadier regi- nature itself seemed here to be debased ment, and during the retreat, distinguished and brutified. Will such creatures, I for acts of savage valour. One day he killed with his own hand, Harry Warburton, the right hand man of my own company, perhaps the finest made and most powerful man in the British army. My soldiers had nicknamed him with a very coarse appellation, and I really felt as if he and I were acquaintances. There he sat as if frozen to death. I went up to the body, and raised up the giant's muscular arm, it fell with a hollow sound, against the bloody side of the corpse.

My eyes unconsciously wandered along the walls. They were covered with grotesque figures and caricatures of the British, absolutely drawn in blood. Horrid blasphemies, and the most shocking obscenities, in the shape of songs, were in like manner written there; and you may guess what an effect they had upon me, when the wretches who had conceived them lay all dead corpses around my feet. I saw two books lying on the floor. I lifted them up. One seemed to be full of the most hideous obscenity: the other was the Bible! It is impossible to tell you the horrour produced in me by this circumstance. The books fell from my hand. They fell upon the breast of one of the bodies. It was a woman's breast. A woman had lived and died in such a place as this! What had been in that heart, now still, perhaps only a few hours before! I know not. It is possible love, strong as death-love, guilty, abandoned, depraved, and linked by vice into misery-but still love, that perished but with the last throb, and yearned in the last convulsion towards some one of these grim dead bodies. I think some

such idea as this came across me at the time; or has it now only arisen ?

Near this corpse lay that of a perfect boy, certainly not more than 17 years of age. There was a littie copper figure of the Virgin Mary round his neck, suspended by a chain of hair. It was of little value, else

thought, ever live again? Why should they? Robbers, ravishers, incendiaries, murderers, suicides, (for a dragon lay with a pistol in his hand, and his scull shattered to pieces,) heroes! The only two powers that reigned here was agony and death. Whatever might have been their characters when alive, all faces were now alike. I could not, in those fixed contortions, tell what was pain from what was anger-misery from what was wickedness. It was now almost dark, and the night was setting in stormier than the day. A strong flash of lightning suddenly illuminated this hold of death, and for a moment shewed me more distinctly the terrible array. A loud squall of wind came round the building, and the old window casement gave way, and fell with a shivering crash in upon the floor. Something rose up with an angry growl from among the dead bodies. It was a huge dark coloured wolf dog, with a spiked collar round his neck; and seeing me, he leaped towards me with gaunt and bony limbs. I am confident that his jaws were bloody. I had instinctively moved backwards towards the door. The surly savage returned growling, to his lair; and in a state of stupefaction. I found myself in the open air. A bugle was playing, and the light infantry company of my own regiment was entering the village with loud hurras.

ORIGINAL.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

ELEMENTS OF GENERAL HISTORY, ANCIENT AND MODERN, &c.

AS mentioned in the last number, this truly excellent work has been recently published in Hartford, by Mr.SAMUEL G.GOODRICH. Professor ALEX. FRAZER TYT

it had not been suffered to remain there. In his hand was a letter; I saw enough to know it was from his mother-Mon chere LER, of Edinburgh University, the fils, &c. It was a terrible place to think author of the original publication, of mother-of home-of any social human holds a distinguished rank amongst ties---Have these ghastly things parents, the profound scholars who have brothers, sisters, lovers? Were they once all happy in peaceful homes? Did given to Edinburgh the appellathese convulsed, and bloody, and man- tion-METROPOLIS OF SCIENCE gled bodies, once lie in undisturbed beds ? Did these clutched hands once press in inAND LITERATURE. The publicafancy a mother's breast? Now all was tions issued from the presses of

that Athens of the globe, within literati, it is clothed in the most the last quarter of the eighteenth, elegant style of simplicity. The and first of the nineteenth century, English reader is never perplexhave excited the admiration of ed with long quotations in Greek, the reading world. A catalogue Latin, and French, but is conof them would embrace "The stantly acquiring the treasures of Circle of the Sciences." Wit-knowledge in his own language. ness that stupendous work" The It is sincerely to be lamented that Edinburgh Encyclopedia"-" An this great lecturer, had not brought Essay on Taste," by Professor his lectures down to the comAllison-"Philosophical Essays," mencement of the nineteenth cenby Professor Stewart--"The Edin- tury, as the first edition of the burgh Review," by Professor Play-work is dated 1801.

fair, Jeffray, &c. &c. And al- The Rev. THOMAS ROBBINS, though we cannot patiently en- A. M. of East-Windsor, Connecdure their occasional severity ticut, commences his portion of against American productions, it the work, where the learned is by giving our days, and our nights professor ends-i. e. at the bealso, to the study of their works, ginning of the eighteenth century, that we may hope to advance and continues the history to 1815. the literary reputation of our own The reader will readily discovcountry. er a striking difference in the A thorough knowledge of his-style of the two authors; but the tory can be acquired by little less American reader, at least, is much than a whole life of study; and indebted to Mr. Robbins. His Professor Tytler must have devo- portion of the work certainly ted much of his, to this interest- evinces great research; and aling subject. Omitting to say any though his arrangement is differe thing of the merits of Millot, Ma-ent from that of the learned Provor, and Bigland, who have pre- fessor, none but those who are sented the world with " General more disposed to discover defects Histories," the writer has no hesi- than to credit merit, will protation in declaring the work un-nounce it injudicious. der consideration, a most invalua- The extensive CHRONOLOGICAL ble acquisition to the lovers of TABLE, which closes the volume, history. The learned author, is worth the price of the whole of with a brevity unequalled, has, in it. It is hoped that Mr. Gooda single volume, afforded the rea- rich will be amply rewarded for der the substance of an ex-publishing this excellent work. tensive historical library. It may be called "The Whole in Little." It may be consulted with boundless advantage by all, from the President of an University, to the humblest seeker after truth. Although delivered in the form of Lectures in the presence of the

CATECHETICAL COMPEND OF GENERAL
HISTORY, SACred and profane &c.

Messrs. Cooke and Hale have recently pulished a third edition of this "New School Book."

Had Doct. Franklin been well

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acquainted with the various sys-, place, presented the world a voltems in Connecticut, he would ume in "Prose and Verse." It probably have defined it "A sim- has many admirers. It would be plifying State."-Government is a digression to say any thing of simplified by Legislators-Law is it in this place, any further than simplified by Judges--Arithmetic' to observe, that no Authoress or is 'simplified by Mr. White-and Author, of Connecticut, ever found by this little volume, History is a better reward for genius-dissimplified by Mr. Frederick But- tinguished patrons, and influential ler, A. M. friends.

The author deserves to be Miss Abby H. Sterry, of the ranked amongst the Patrons of same place, is the writer of the Youth. His manner of teaching volume under consideration. It and writing, blends amusement would offend the delicacy of with instruction, and is well cal- the amiable Authoress, to proculated to "teach the young idea nounce it a work of superlative how to shoot." The reputation merit, nor is the writer disposed of this work is too well established, to be guilty of the offence. But, where known, to be increased considering the advantages she by any remarks that can be made. has enjoyed, and the circumThe Publishers are certain of an stances under which she wrote, handsome sale, for "years to it may certainly be compared come;" and it is hoped the in- with many modern productions genious, laborious, and worthy without any disadvantage to it. author, will not be in the situation of most authors"Who beat the bush while others catch part written in prose; and this is

the bird."

EFFUSIONS, Religious,moRAL, AND PATRIOTIC, IN PROSE AND VERSE. A small volume, of the above title, has lately been "printed for the author," by Mr. Samuel Green of New London.

The poetic part of the volume, we think has less merit than that

easily accounted for-the subjects are too trite. Hundreds, and probably thousands, have writtensome in the finest strains, upon Maternal Love'--' The day of Rest' The death of and Lines' upon almost every thing. It is to be regretted that Miss Sterry attempted to pen a couplet Whether it arises from the ro- or a paragraph upon Autumn, or mantic country-the beautiful any other season-The reader, streams-the majestic waterfall, if he has ever read Thompson's or some other cause, is unknown | Seasons,' will read her Effusions' to the writer-but certain it is, and all others, with frigid indifferthat the town situated at the ence. That the authoress should head of the Thames,* has produc- have written (either in 'prose or ed more than its quota of female verse' upon Sensibility' is pergeniuses. But a few years since, fectly natural; for every female Miss Huntly, a native of that who writes at all, must write some*Norwich, Connecticut. thing upon that subject. Itis an

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