N.B. This is an excessively stupid song, written more than 20 years ago by one HOPKINSON, a lawyer of Philadelphia, who seems to have been born to be an ornament of Grub-Street. But, however silly the thoughts or inflated the expressions, down it goes if national vanity or party strife lay hold of it. "_Hail Columbia_" is much about upon a level with "_God save the king_;" they have both had about the same cause to keep them in vogue; but, I must confess, that the Americans, with _manacles on their hands and chains round their necks_, singing songs in praise of the _freedom_ of that Country, is going a little further than our fools when they bleat and bellow and bawl out that parcel of stuff, that low bombast, which the news-papers, in their cant, call "Our great National _Anthem_;" an "_Anthem_" that talks, amongst other things, of "confounding _politicks_ and all their _knavish tricks_!" Come, come: we must not pretend to _laugh_ at the Washington Negro!--W. C. [18] Judge Morrel, in his charge to the grand jury of Washington, at the session of the circuit court of the United States, in January 1816, for the district of Columbia, urged this subject to its attention very emphatically, as an object of remonstrance and juridical investigation. He said the frequency with which the streets of the city had been crowded with manacled captives, sometimes even on the sabbath, could not fail to shock the feelings of all humane persons; that it was repugnant to the spirit of our political institutions, and the rights of man, and he believed was calculated to impair the public morals, by familiarizing scenes of cruelty to the minds of youth. [19] Extract from the preamble to the first act passed by the legislature of Pennsylvania, for the gradual abolition of slavery in that state: "Sect. 2. And whereas the condition of those persons who have heretofore been denominated negro and mulatto slaves, has been attended with circumstances which not only deprived them of the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to, but has cast them into the deepest afflictions by an unnatural separation of husband and wife from each other and from their children--an injury the greatness of which can only be conceived by supposing that we were in the same unhappy case," &c. Darwin, who may well be styled an _arch connoisseur_, both in physiology and morality, in his classification of human diseases, includes one which he denominates _Nostalgia_, and thus defines it: