they are exported to Oonting, and other parts of the island. Some of the pouches of the chiefs were made of cloth, which they say comes from China; it is exactly like our broad cloth. We tried in vain to learn what goods they send to China in exchange for silks: perhaps sulphur forms a part, which these islands are said to produce, as well as tin. From the number of vessels constantly sailing out and in, it ap pears that they must have some trade, but our inquiries on this and many other topics, though sedulously pursued, led to nothing satisfactory, owing probably rather to our ignorance of the language, than to any wish on their part to withhold information; because, on topics which had no reference to the royal family or the women, they in general spoke freely.

We had frequent opportunities of seeing their method of making salt, and an account of it may, perhaps, be interesting. Near the sea, large level fields are rolled or beat so as to have a hard surface. Over this is strewn a sort of sandy black earth, forming a coat about a quarter of an inch thick. Rakes and other implements are used to make it of a uniform thickness, but it is not pressed down. During the heat of the day, men are employed to bring water in tubs from the sea, which is sprinkled over these fields by means of a short scoop. The heat of the sun, in a short time, evaporates the water, and the salt is left in the sand, which is scraped up and put into raised receivers of masonry about six feet by four, and five deep. When the receiver is full of the sand, sea water is poured on the top, and this, in its way down, carries with it the salt left by evaporation. When it runs out below

at a small hole, it is a very strong brine; this is reduced to salt by being boiled in vessels about three feet wide and one deep. The cakes resulting from this operation are an inch and an half in thickness.

"Of the population of this island we know nothing satisfactory: the natives invariably pleaded ignorance themselves; and as we had no precise data, our estimates were made at random, and as they never agreed with each other, they are not worthy of notice. From the south point of this island, to five or six miles north of Napakiang, an extent of sixteen or eighteen miles, the country is highly cultivated, and is almost entirely covered with villages. All round Port Melville too there are populous villages, but the north, north-east and eastern places are thinly peopled, and not cultivated to any extent. We saw nothing like poverty or distress of any kind: every person that we met seemed We saw no contented and happy. deformed people, nor any who bore indications of disease, except a few who were marked with the small-pox.

"The style of living of those with whom we associated is generous and free; their custom of carrying about their dinner in boxes, and making little pic-nic parties, is peculiarly striking, and they appeared fully sensible of the advantage of bringing people together in this way, and expressed much satisfaction at the ready way in which

we fell into a custom from which all formality was dismissed. They shewed, moreover, a good deal of discernment, and could adapt themselves to the character of the particular person they happened to be in company with, in a manner very remarkable; but this was evidently the result not of cunning, but of

correct

correct feelings, and of a polite habit of thinking.

"Of their manners, little need be added here to what every page of the narrative will show. It ought to be particularly noticed, however, that they are an exceedingly timorous people, and naturally suspicious of foreigners. A stranger visiting Loo-choo ought therefore to keep these features of their character constantly in mind. By imitating Captain Maxwell's wise plan of treating the natives with gentleness and kindness, and shewing every consideration for their peculiarities, he will stand the best chance of gaining their good-will and con

fidence. But if he should betray any impatience, or be at all harsh in treating with them, he may rest assured that he will lose much time, and in all probability fail at last in his attempts to establish an unreserved and friendly intercourse.

"As Loo-choo, however, lies quite out of the track of trading ships, and does not appear to pro duce any thing of value itself, and as the inhabitants seem indifferent about foreign commodities, and if they wished to possess them, are without money to make purchases, it is not probable that this island will be soon revisited."

BELLES

A

LL the works of this Author are so characteristic of him, in almost every sentence, that he could never expect to conceal himself by publishing anonymously; and there is scarcely any author of the present day, about whose merits there is such a decided difference of opinion. By some he is held up as a most original, profound, and eloquent critic, endowed with great power of language; by others, he is scouted as a man full of conceit and affectation, with taste, judgment, and principles alike erro

neous.

The truth seems to be, that his excellencies and his faults as an author are both equally glaring and obtrusive; and that whichsoever of these, from prepossession, prejudice, or other circumstances, strikes the reader first, fills his mind so completely, and fixes on it so powerfully, that he cannot perceive, or will not acknowledge the opposite qualities.

We must confess, that we do not entertain a very high opinion of Mr. Hazlitt's powers as a critic: he

seems to us to possess no clear, comprehensive, and fixed principles on which his praise or his censure proceeds. Those passages in this and all his works, in which he attempts to lay down such principles, are vague and obscure. He is also unequal to the regular developement of his thoughts; and is more anxious, or better able to surprise the reader into his own opinions, by the singularity of his remarks, or of the style in which they are conveyed, than to lead him gradually to coincide with him, by the force of his reasoning, or to win him over, by an appeal to his feelings.

His style is often pertly familiar, and sometimes offensively egotistical; and a great many of his remarks are well suited to such a style. At other times, his style is overloaded with metaphorical language, to such a degree, that the thought, if good or original, is so concealed as not to be seen, or so disfigured as not to be recognised. This style however has its advantages; for it often deceives the

reader

reader into a belief that he has met with something new, acute, or profound, whereas no such thing exists; and we strongly suspect that if the outrageous admirers of Mr. Hazlitt would examine into the source of their admiration, they would find it to spring much more from the manner than the substance of his writings. At the same time, we are decidedly of opinion, that he possesses considerable acuteness

of intellect; a vivid but not a pure perception of the powers and beauties of genius, and occasionally an originality of thought; all of which would appear to much greater advantage if they were accompanied, aided, and directed by greater simplicity of mind, and a more chaste and refined taste; and if they were not degraded and weakened by conceit, affectation, pertness, illiberality, and prejudice.

"THIS is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we may be said almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought "this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;" whom man delighted not, nor woman neither;" he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick's skull; the school-fellow of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad and sent to England; the slow avenger of his father's death; who lived at the court of Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because we have read them in Shakespear.

"Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is

in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself "too much i' th' sun;" whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes;" he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre ; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play

as

as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them this is the true Hamlet.

"We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to criticise it any more than we should know how to describe our own faces. But we must make such observations as we can. It is the one of Shakespear's plays that we think of the oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. What ever happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser, and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is not a common-place pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied developement of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shewn more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: every thing is left for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is excited without effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left entirely to themselves. There is no set pur pose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene-the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken

place at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a by-stander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not only "the outward pageants and the signs of grief;" but "we have that within us which passes shew." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.

"The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility-the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other tinies, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical; dallies with