The reader may possibly surmise, that my leading remarks have a particular reference to the recent shipwreck of the Elizabeth, upon the coast of New York. This catastrophe, which is imputed to ignorance and miscalculation, involves the loss of an interesting and intelligent young gentleman, Mr. Horace Sumner, of this city, and of the Marquis and Marchioness Ossoli, and their child. One of these sufferers I have known, in earlier days. Under the quiet, unpresuming roof of her worthy father, Mr. Timothy Fuller, I have met his daughter Margaret. Few then would have anticipated her melancholy fate, and fewer still, that she would become an Italian marchioness! Let me devote the remaining space, in the present article, to those unmitigated wretches, with hearts of flint, who rioted and revelled, amid the sufferings of their fellow-beings. An opportunity will now be afforded, to stamp this hellish practice, with all the force of the law, and whatever there may be of indignant severity, in public sentiment. Luring vessels on shore, by arranging false lights, and robbing wrecks are crimes of great antiquity. But I had no suspicion, that even the latter practice was carried on, so systematically, and so boldly, as it appears to have been, at the present day, in the State of New York. The names of the places, where these atrocities were committed, Fire Island, Patchogue, Islip, Babylon have something of a Cornish sound, undoubtedly. Of old, in all the northern regions of Europe, and especially, along the coasts of the Baltic Sea, a wreck was deemed "_a Providence_;" and laws were in force, authorizing the inhabitants to fall on, and plunder at discretion, or, in the language, then employed--"_in naufragorum miseria et calamitate, tanquam vultures, ad prædam currere_." Of the earlier periods of our own history, tales have been told, which, though almost beyond belief, would not have been related, if they had not been somewhere, upon the outskirts or frontiers of probability. Thus many--many--very many years ago, tradition intimates, that a worthy clergyman of Truro was interrupted, in the middle of his discourse, by one of his deacons, who caused the whole congregation to rise _en masse_, by seizing his hat and crying aloud--"_a wreck!_" whereupon the good man is reported, while putting up his notes, and opening the pulpit door, to have exclaimed--"_Stay--stay, my Christian friends, let us all have a fair start_."