in some, and the insincerity of others of his party, as to the real objects to be obtained by force of arms; but whatever may be the judgment passed upon Lord Essex's decision in accepting the post of command, he is entitled on all sides to the respect due to the strictest honour and fidelity to the trust he had accepted his alliance was courted by the King when smarting under the intrigues of his secret foes in Parliament; he was blamed for want of success when feebly supported or maliciously interfered with by aspiring rivals to power; but neither respect for the office of the King, nor resentment against his treacherous friends and covert enemies, ever made him swerve from his duty to the trust imposed upon him. The successful measures of Cromwell for the advancement of himself and his own immediate party, finally drove him into the resignation of his command; and on the 2nd of April, 1645, he delivered his commission into those hands that gave it,' seeing, as he said, that by the now coming up of these ordinances that it is the desire of the House of Commons it may be vacated.' The resignation was accepted; but the two Houses waited on him the next day, at Essex House, to thank him for his patriotism with the highest encomiums on his conduct, and the strongest expression of their sense of his past services.' (Vol. ii. p. 455.)

The soldiers who had served under his immediate command resented the change of Generals: their devotion to Essex was so well known that precautions were adopted to prevent danger arising from their dissatisfaction; and the Horse, quartered in Hertfordshire, having shown symptoms of resistance, Essex nobly interposed the authority of his wishes to beg they would submit to the ordinance, and serve the newly appointed officers as faithfully as those who had been removed. Thus closed his military career, chequered at various times by such reverses and successes as attended the arms of the opposing parties during the civil war, but adorned throughout its course by the order and discipline maintained in the army under his immediate command.

Lord Essex died, Sept. 14. 1646, of a fever, brought on by over exertion in a stag-hunt in Windsor Forest; his remains were honoured by a public funeral, for the expenses of which no less a sum than 5000l. was voted by Parliament to his executors. With him the title of Essex became extinct in the Devereux family, his cousin Sir Walter Devereux of Castle Bromwich succeeded him as Viscount Hereford.

Captain Devereux has completed his task of the Lives of the Devereux Earls of Essex;" and though we may think he has

been too favourable in his estimate of the second Earl of Essex's character, and has scarcely appreciated the great merits of the third Earl, yet full credit must be awarded to him for the pains he has bestowed, and the ability he has evinced in this work.

It bears the mark of great industry and of an honest desire to ascertain the truth, and when ascertained, to state it fairly. Amongst the minor excellencies of the book, we must not omit to remark on the good sense which has prompted him to adopt the modern spelling for the original letters, and thus remove a decided obstacle to their perusal.

There are faults of arrangement, and some inelegancies which a more practised writer would have avoided, but the style is simple, straightforward, and manly; it is neither highly finished, nor very forcible, nor eloquently persuasive; but it has the merit of being perfectly unaffected and entirely free from the mannerism and commonplace ornament which pervades the style of hacknied authors-it is the work of an honest English gentleman, who having had the patience and industry to collect materials fit to be published, wrote his book that others might read and acquire with ease the information he had collected and arranged with considerable labour. It is to be hoped that Captain Devereux will be tempted to make further research in the hidden stores of original MSS. and again repeat his efforts in the field of historical biography.

ART. VI.-1. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Board of Education; together with the Fifteenth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board. Boston, Massachusetts: 1852.

2. Revised Statutes of Massachusetts.

1837.

3. Report of the Cambridge School Committee. 1852.

4. Report on the Organisation of the Primary and Grammar School Committee. Boston: 1852.

5. Annual Report of the Superintendant of Common Schools of the State of New York. 1851.

6. Report of Committee of the Board of Education on the System of Popular Education in the City of New York, May 28.

1851.

7. Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York. 1851.

8. Seventeenth Annual Report of Superintendant of Common Schools of Pennsylvania for year ending June, 1850.

9. Thirty-third Annual Report of the Controllers of Public Schools of the City and County of Philadelphia. 1851. 10. Biennial Report of the Superintendant of Public Instruction for the State of Iowa, printed for the use of the General Assembly. 1850.

11. Report on the Public Libraries of the United States of America, January 1. 1850. By CHARLES C. JEWETT, Librarian of the Smithsonian Institute.

12. The Educational Institutions of the United States; their Character and Organisation. Translated from the Swedish of P. A. SIBJESTRÖM, M. A., by FREDERICA ROWAN. In 1 vol. 12mo. London: 1853.

THE man still lives who can remember the United States of America as the humble dependencies of Great Britain. A few remote colonies fringing the shores of the Atlantic hemmed in by mountains and forests, had made little impression on the wilderness. Almost without roads, a mere bridle path sufficed for their weekly mail. No banks nor monied institutions gave aid to commerce. Agriculture resorted to the rudest tools. A small class of vessels confined to the coasting trade, the fisheries, or an occasional voyage to the West Indies or Europe, formed their shipping. Manufactures and the mechanic arts were in their cradle. A little molasses was distilled into rum. A few coarse cloths were made in the hand loom, and so inferior were the sheep that a traveller predicted broadcloth could never be manufactured.

Some iron had been melted with charcoal, but furnaces and forges languished under jealous governors. The vast beds of coal which underlie the Middle States were unknown, and cotton, the great basis of modern manufactures, had not blossomed in the Colonies. The policy of the mother country was to make marts for her merchants, and to restrict the Colonies to the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, rice, and to bread stuffs, and the shipment of these staples, with staves, lumber, and naval stores, to the mother country. These articles were dispensed by England to the residue of Europe.

The population of these Colonies was less than 3,000,000; and their chief sea-ports, Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, contained each from ten to twenty thousand inhabitants.

But the colonists, although poor, and indebted to the British merchants, had carried with them from their native land an inalienable love of freedom; were tenacious of their rights, and resolute in their opposition to excise and stamp acts. They

spurned the idea of taxation without representation. England was sadly misguided; a seven years' war ensued. The British arms, often victorious, achieved no permanent success, and were finally foiled by an endurance never surpassed. The colonists prevailed, but their success was almost ruinous. At the close of a protracted war they found their country impoverished, their Union dissolving, their sea-ports desolate, their ships decayed, and the flower of their youth withered in the field or in the prison-ship. From this period of gloom and exhaustion little progress was made until the adoption of the Constitution in 1788, and the funding of the public debt under the wise administration of Washington.

We now begin a new era. Let us consider what advance

the United States have made from this dawn of the nation in the sixty years which have ensued. The country has shown a renovating power. The flood of population has swept over the Alleghanies, crossed the blue Ohio and Father of Waters, followed the shores of the great lakes, and is rolling up the Missouri of the West. Its advancing tide has already enlivened the coasts of Florida and Texas, and reached the shores of Oregon and California. The thirteen States have swelled to thirty-one, and the national territory now covers 3,000,000 of square miles, mostly adapted to cultivation.

A prolific and almost exhaustless soil invites the Western husbandman.

The implements of husbandry, improved by thousands of patents, have adapted themselves to a country in which land is cheap and labour dear, and some of them compete successfully with English tools in foreign markets.

Cotton has been acclimated, and gives yearly its 3,000,000 of bales. Tobacco yields its 170,000 hogsheads, and sugar, of recent introduction, a similar amount. Such is the capacity of the country for bread stuffs, that the failure of a crop in Europe draws out a supply not only sufficient to check the march of famine, but to baffle all previous calculation. Manufactures have become firmly rooted. The manufacture of iron annually reaches to 600,000 tons. Not less than 700,000 bales of cotton also are consumed in the country, if we may rely on the late census.

Not only do short-horn Durhams graze on the plains of the Ohio, but the Spanish and French merinoes and Saxon flocks have been imported, and the native race been gradually improved.

The home manufacture now consumes 52,000,000 of pounds of native wool, besides large imports of foreign from Turkey, Buenos Ayres, and Africa. A single State manufactures boots

and shoes to the yearly value of 6,000,000l. sterling, and exports glass-wares, cotton goods, and wooden ware to India, South America, and the Mediterranean. Singular as it may appear, the United States now draw some of their raw materials from Great Britain. Large shipments of skins and hides are often made from London and Liverpool, to be tanned into leather by cheap and expeditious processes in the hemlock forests of New York. Before the Revolution an American book was a rarity; but now rags are imported from England and Italy, converted into paper by patented machines, and circulated in books and journals through North America. Some of these journals issue 50,000 copies daily, and there are publishers who find an annual vent for 150,000 copies of geographies and arithmetics. It is doubtless true that less attention is given in the States to more costly and delicate products of art than in Europe; but it is also well understood, that many of the most expert manufacturers declined to send their goods to the London Exhibition, for they preferred the home market to the European, and wished to invite no rivalry in goods suited to the States.

The late census exhibits the rapid progress of the mechanic arts throughout the Union. In other departments the United States have not been dormant. While Mexico has for sixty years either receded or remained stationary in the population of its states and cities, the United States have increased from 3,000,000 to 26,000,000, and now exhibit an annual accession of 1,100,000 people.

The city of New York, with its suburbs, presents 700,000 inhabitants; Philadelphia, 500,000; Boston, with its environs 300,000; and Baltimore nearly 200,000 in one compact body. Cincinnati and New Orleans respectively exceed 100,000; and St. Louis, Louisville, Pittsburg, Albany, and Buffalo follow close in their rear.

The country is threaded by numerous post roads, interlaced by 13,000 miles of railway, and still more closely united by a greater length of telegraph wires. By means of these, a message can be sent hundreds of miles for a shilling, and the merchant at New Orleans can in the same day charter ships at New York or Boston, and order their cargoes from St. Louis or Cincinnati; while the orator addresses in the same hour audiences in all the large cities of the Union.

The mails, accelerated by steam, bear letters from Savannah to Eastport for a stamp costing little more than the penny postage of England. The foreign trade exhibits an aggregate of 80,000,000l. sterling of imports and exports. The inland commerce exceeds the foreign, while the shipping at this moment,