The antiquity and warlike renown of England sit equally and visibly impressed on the crest of the miserable Mississagua as on that of Gibraltar. Fort Niagara, an old French Indian stockade, modernized by the American engineers from time to time, half-lighthouse, half-fortification, glaring with whitewashed walls, that may be seen almost at Toronto, with a flag-staff towering to the skies, and a flag which would cover the deck of a first-rate, displayed from morn to night, speaks of the new nation, whose pretensions must ever be put in plain view, and constantly tell the tale that America is a second edition of the best work of English industry and of British valour--a second edition interwoven, however, with foreign matter, with French _fierte_ without French _politesse_, with German mysticism without German learning, with the restless and rabid democracy of the whole world without the salutary check of venerable laws, and with that strange mixture of freedom and slavery, of tolerance and intolerance, which distinguishes America of the nineteenth century. But it is, nevertheless, a most extraordinary spectacle, to contemplate the rise and progress of the union in so short a period since the declaration of independence. An Irish gentleman, apparently a clergyman, last year favoured the public with the result of an extensive tour in Canada and the United States, in "Letters from America." He starts in his preface with these remarkable expressions, which must be well considered and analyzed, because they are the deliberate convictions of an observant and well-informed man, who had, moreover, singular opportunities of reflecting upon the people he had so long travelled amongst. He says that "In energy, perseverance, enterprise, sagacity, activity, and varied resources" the Americans infinitely surpass the British; that he never met with "a stupid American." That our "American children" surpass us not only in our good, but "in our evil peculiarities." This I cannot understand; for, surely, if we have _peculiarities_, which there is no denying, they must by all the rules of logic be limited to ourselves. But the writer observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic faculty--what an abominable word aesthetic is! it always puts me in mind of asthmatic, for it is broken-winded learning.