but I saw as great a wonder, in a church last Sunday. The music struck me as particularly fine; I doubted not that it was an organ; till, looking up to the gallery, there sat a gentleman scraping away with might and main _upon a violin_, and another upon a bass viol: accompanied by a flute, and an admirably tuned choir. "Our armies swore terribly in Flanders:" but it was nothing to the deep, anathematizing abomination with which some "unco guid" folks of my acquaintance (not of yours) would have beheld this uncommon mode of "hymning the great Creator." Even me, it affected very singularly: I thought of the war-lock-dance in Kirk Alloway; of Auld Nick in shape of "towsie tyke, black, grim and large," whose province it was to "gie them music;" how "He screwed the pipes and gart them skirl, Till roof and rafters a' did dirl;" While "hornpipes, jigs, strathpeys and reels, Put life and mettle in their heels:" "Wi' mair o' horrible and awfu' Which e'en to name wad be unlawfu':" and I did not know what catastrophe might ensue, from the profanation. Happily, however, none occurred. In the formalities of piety, the descendants of the Pilgrims are radically changed from the puritanical strictness of their forefathers. The quaint names, indeed, are retained; but the straight-lacedness they imply is gone: you find _Leah_, or _Naomi_, upon near approach, to be as arch a lass, and _Jeremiah_, or _Timothy_, as merry a grig, as any Sally, or Betty, Tom, or Bob, south of the Potomac. No one in Massachusetts is any longer compelled by law to pay for the support of religion, its temples, or its ministers. The law, requiring the citizen to do so, only letting him choose the sect or the minister to whom his contribution should enure, was repealed last year. Each religious _society_--answering to _congregation_ with us--has a sort of _corporate_ faculty, involving the power to tax its members for church expenses, and to coerce payment by distress if it be withheld. Even this is a stride towards hierarchy from which _our_ lawgivers have shrunk ever since 1785; and which our people will probably never permit. I must say more to you, of the goodly land I have just left. My having quitted it, need subtract nothing from the credit attached to my observations: for I shall touch no topic, which is not as fresh in my mind, and as susceptible of truthful representation, as if the local scene itself stretched around me. Adieu From the Western Monthly Magazine. AMERICAN LITERATURE.--ITS IMPEDIMENTS.