position which we would not make of any one not convicted of such ignorance of English; we can inform these gentlemen that there are rhymes of the same sort in every English volume. Not to mention Dryden, and many writers of less harmonious ear, who have relaxed far more the rigid rules of rhyme; we will select from the writings of Pope, the most fastidious writer, and one who possessed the greatest facility in versification, quite enough we think to excuse Mr. Barlow.

First then, as to Plain and Man, there is in Abelard and Eloisa,

And the same verse is repeated half a dozen times. So too, Load and God, B. 8, v. 235—And Stood and God, and Abode and God.

As to Share and War, the rhymes Care and War, Air and War, &c. occur times without number. Nay there are even the very original couplets.

Foremost he press'd in glorious toils to share,
And scarce refrained when I forbade the war.

B. 5. v. 1000.

On my rash courage charge the chance of war,
And blame those virtues which they cannot share.

B. 22. v. 148.

If however, the objection be to the near occurrence of the rhymes, not having ever made an epic, we presume that in some

thousand lines it would be almost impossible to avoid such oc casional similarities. We judge so, because on merely turning over the pages of the Iliad, the most studied collection of rhymes ever published; we find the fault imputed to Mr. B. much more apparent-for we had scarcely opened the volume when we observed in the course of twenty lines, these rhymes, Bear and War-Bear and War, again-Dare and War, B. 17, v. 515, &c.

The rhymes Floods and Gods occur twice in the space of ten lines; and we have no doubt fifty such may be pointed out: a proof this how exceedingly fallacious are all such garbled and mutilated extracts.

We.now dismiss this criticism. In the space of a single page we have found no less than eleven gross errors, which it is most charitable to impute to an ignorance, of which any boy in America would be ashamed. There would, indeed, be something quite pleasant in hearing such persons express an anxiety lest the Americans should corrupt the English language, if the dogmatism with which these follies are uttered did not excite contempt. We recommend to these acute personages to go back to some Scotch grammar school, and before they assume their criticism on American language, to meditate by day and night such writings as those of Johnson, and Walker, and Sheridan.

FOR THE PORT FOLIO.

COMPARATIVE TRAITS OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN CHARACTER.

London 1799.

NOTWITHSTANDING two centuries have nearly elapsed since the first North American colonists migrated from Old England, the same pronunciation of the mother tongue prevails in the streets of Philadelphia, and the presence chamber at St. James's; and the courts of the United States discuss the laws of England, or pronounce their decisions, under no cumbersome distinctions of dress, with as much eloquence and precision as is done at Westminster, under flowing robes and full-bottomed wigs.

Yet the English generally spoken in London is neither correct nor harmonious: the lower classes universally offend, more or less, against the arbitrary rules of the spelling-book; and even the upper ranks have contracted a habit of mutilating their words, in the undistinguishing hurry of a loud and rapid utterance.

The combinations of the auxiliary verbs are generally abbreviated as, "I won't"-" It a'nt" "You sha'nt;" and the names of places, especially if they happen to be inconveniently long, are sometimes ridiculously foreshortened. The instance of Brumagem for Birmingham was already familiar to my ears; but in those of, "Gracious-street, Sinjin-street, and Bedlam," I with difficulty recognised Grace Church-street, St. John-street, and Bethlehem Hospital. The r final is often omitted as, "She is my sista," "I had ratha' not" &c. The v and are frequently transposed, with designed or inattentive peculiarity; and, still more inexcusably, the letter h is sometimes rejected, as too harsh for delicate pronunciation, and sometimes adopted again, gratuitously. A species of refinement, by the way, which is of late frequently affected in Philadelphia, as well as the kindred improvement which converts wounds into woonds, and heard into herd.

At our present lodgings, in the heart of the city, are two female domestics: one of them, whose name is Hannah, is charily softened down to Anna; and the other whose real name is Ann, is laboriously aspirated into Hann. The latter herself was over

heard the other day, towards dinner time, asking her mistress if it was time to "eat the hoven;" and a young gentleman, of polite education, lately entertained us, from a newspaper, with an unintelligible lecture about a flock of birds that had been seen "overing in the hair."

Out of London the corruptions of the vernacular tongue are still more puzzling to a stranger. On the South Coast, for instance (from whence Edward Winslow took shipping, with his followers, in 1620, to establish themselves upon Cape Cod) I traced the origin of the drawling tone that we suppose peculiar to the inhabitants of Massachusetts; and in the same quarter of Great Britain, I dissipated the vulgar prejudice which attributes the mad and cruel suspicions of imaginary witchcraft to the superstitious enthusiasm of the first settlers of New England: for here I learned that they had derived that unhappy prepossession from the habitual intolerance of the mother country; and that the gloomy vision was much sooner dispelled in Salem and Boston than in Cornwall and Devonshire. It stands recorded, that at Tring in Hertfordshire (not fifty miles from London) a man suffered death as a wizard, as lately as the year 1750, a species of legalized murder for which the New Englanders have not been chargeable since 1692.

Severity was the custom of England, when our ancestors quitted the island; and so deeply was it rooted that when the Lycurgus of Americ, awould have alleviated the cruelty of the penal code in his province of Pennsylvania, Queen Ann's ministry refused to ratify the innovation. It was not till after the late happy Revolution set us free from the trammels of prescriptive error, that the degrading system of corporal punishment was transmuted for useful labour and solitary confinement, except in cases of murder; an exception that seems likely to be soon done away by the increasing conviction that the punishment of death is neither necessary nor justifiable.

The merciless and shameful manner of whipping children, still common in English schools, has at the same time been disused in the United States (the aborigines of America never struck their children;) and the treatment of negro slaves, is no

longer cruel-a presumption that the time draws nigh when it will cease to be unjust.

To say nothing of the Cornish, the Welsh, and the Erse languages, all spoken in different parts of the little Island of Great Britain, a Somersetshire farmer, in his own current English, is less intelligible at York, and a north country clothier is more like a foreigner at London, than an American sailor, with or without education, whether he shipped himself in the river Mississippi, or the Bay of Fundy--in the sunshine of latitude 31, or in the fogs of 45.*

Yet some English words have slightly changed their application in America: for instance," a clever fellow" does not with us indicate a cunning sharper; and "an ordinary woman" would designate a person of ill fame, rather than one that had the misfortune to be homely: but, in return, as many local phrases have retained their pristine meaning, where their origin can be no longer traced. Although we have renounced Episcopal Sees, we still say of a fabric, unnecessarily large, "It's a cathedral of a place.”—To follow a winding road is going, "round about Robin Hood's barn"--To take produce to a glutted market is "like carrying coals to Newcastle," an incredible story is, " A Canterbury tale," and in the clear atmosphere of America, a lingering messenger is still said to be "lost in the fog."

An American may be distinguished from a native of England, by the openness of his countenance, the mildness of his voice, and the unaffected simplicity of his carriage: as is proved every day at London by the beggars upon Tower Hill, who can tell an American captain, just arrived, as far as they can see him: and the distinction rewards their sagacity; for if he never was out of America before, he will throw down a shilling, where another would give a halfpenny.

An American traveller never refuses an application for charity, or thinks of giving any thing but silver, till he has learned in Europe to make his way, through host of beggars, by the parsi

In the hundreds of Yorkshire when I visited the cottage of my English ancestors, my cousin John Bull gruffly observed, "Why I dou'nt see but what they speak, as good English as we do oursels."