arising in some way (not very clearly made out) to trouble the repose of his home, he leaves it in horror, and rushes in the gray dawn to the seaside rocks; seated on which, he draws a sort of consolation for his terrors, or of sympathy with his wounded heart, from that mimicry of life which goes on forever amongst the raving waves. From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan (or, as he chose to call it, after Dampier and others, _John_) Fernandez. Very lately, (December, 1837,) the newspapers of America informed us, and the story was current for full nine days, that this fair island had been swallowed up by an earthquake; or, at least, that in some way or other it had disappeared. Had that story proved true, one pleasant bower would have perished, raised by Pink as a memorial expression of his youthful feelings either towards De Foe, or his visionary creature, Robinson Crusoe--but rather, perhaps, towards the substantial Alexander Selkirk; for it was raised on some spot known or reputed by tradition to have been one of those most occupied as a home by Selkirk. I say, "rather towards Alexander Selkirk;" for there is a difficulty to the judgment in associating Robinson Crusoe with this lovely island of the Pacific, and a difficulty even to the fancy. _Why_, it is hard to guess, or through what perverse contradiction to the facts, De Foe chose to place the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe upon the _eastern_ side of the American continent. Now, not only was this in direct opposition to the realities of the case upon which he built, as first reported (I believe) by Woodes Rogers, from the log book of the Duke and Duchess,--(a privateer fitted out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol merchants, two or three years before the peace of Utrecht,) and so far the mind of any man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this western island,--but a worse obstacle than that, because a moral one, is this, that, by thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled sea,--the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating world, the great throughfare of nations,--and thus has prejudiced the moral sense and the fancy against his fiction still more inevitably than his judgment, and in a way that was perfectly needless; for the change brought along with it no shadow of compensation.