It is surprising that in a country where such an event as the death of General Hamilton could be productive of such a general feeling of regret, duels of the most wanton and desperate nature so frequently occur. But a very few years since a furious outbreak of temper was manifested in the state of Louisiana, where a Mr. Labranch, president of the legislative assembly, as he was about taking the chair, was assaulted by a Mr. Grymes, who endeavoured to strike him with a stick, when he drew a pocket pistol and fired at the aggressor, but missed him, and Grymes, in his turn, drew out a horse pistol loaded with ball and slugs, and fired at him. The ball grazed the head of a senator who was seated near the chairman, and who received two slugs in his arm and hand. This occurred in 1835. The same year a duel took place between a lieutenant of the American Navy, and three passengers in a steam-boat, two of whom were brothers. The parties landed; the lieutenant received a ball in the hip, and one of the brothers fell dead on his fire. The surviving brother sought to avenge him, but also received a mortal wound. The third survivor now insisted upon satisfaction from the lieutenant’s second, whom he shot in the breast; he then obliged the lieutenant, although exhausted from loss of blood, to satisfy him still further, when he mortally wounded him. Fighting with rifles and muskets, sometimes by beat of drum, is not an uncommon method of settling an American dispute; and frequently, as in the case of their disputes with our officers at Gibraltar, Americans have insisted upon fighting _double-handed_, or resting the pistol to level it on the left arm: a proposal made to one of our officers, a Captain G----, who had lost the use of his right arm in the Pyrenees, but who contrived with his left to wound very severely the desperado who sought to take such an unfair advantage of an honourable infirmity. These differences, to which we shall refer elsewhere, must have led to the most fatal consequences, had not the American commodore very wisely put out to sea.