enterprise was, at the commencement, fully recognised by the colonial authorities at home. This is a painful story of a few years’ misadventure and wrecked fortune, and ingratitude to a man whose honour and integrity, in the face of misfortune, should at least have shielded him from insult. Yet how forcibly does it illustrate the perils which so often beset the restless spirit! --------------------- Footnote 123: Such a person knows as much of what true felicity consists as did Horace Walpole’s gardener, who thought it “something of a bulbous root.” ---------------------------- THE PRESENT AND THE PAST. Sharon Turner, a man of sound, practical sense, as well as a reverential and reflective writer of history, has these pertinent remarks upon the tendency of historians to magnify the Present at the expense of the Past: Nothing is a greater reproach, to the reasoning intellect of any age than a splenetic censoriousness on the manners and characters of our ancestors. It is but common justice for us to bear in mind that in those times we should have been as they were, as they in ours would have resembled ourselves. Both are but the same men, acting under different circumstances, wearing different dresses, and pursuing different objects; but neither inferior to the other in talent, industry, or intellectual worth. The more we study biography, we shall perceive more evidence of this truth. Disregarding what satire might, without being cynical, lash in our own costumes, we are apt to look proudly back on those who have gone before us, and to regale our self-complacency with comparisons of their deficiencies, and of our greater merit. The retrospect is pleasing, but it offers no ground for exultation. We are superior, and we have in many things better taste and sounder judgment and wiser habits than they possessed. And why? Because we have had means of superiority by which they were not assisted. But a merit which owes its origin merely to our having followed, instead of preceding, in existence, gives us no right to depreciate those over whom our only advantage has been the better fortune of a later chronology. We may therefore allow those who have gone before us to have been amused with what would weary or dissatisfy us, without either sarcasms on their absurdities, or contemptuous wonder at their stately childishness and pompous inanities. One of our most popular historians indulges to excess in these brilliant antitheses, which in his pages remind one of poppies in corn. ---------------------------- CIRCUMSTANCES AND GENIUS. This episode in man’s history,—this stage in the great struggle of life,—has been thus powerfully painted by a contemporary: