imited in preaching, or the lawyer in argument; but conformity to the
Procrustean bed, in whose sheets we had in advance stipulated to
_sleep_, cost us the amputation of a few of our least important heads.

"Don't be too English," suggests a very wise and politic friend. We are
fully aware of the prejudice which still exists in many minds in our
country, against what is peculiarly English. Because, forsooth, our good
Mother England, towards a century ago, like most fond mothers, thought
her transatlantic daughter quite too young and inexperienced to set up
an establishment and manage it for herself, and drove her into wasteful
experiments of wholesale tea-making in Boston harbor, by way of
illustrating her capacity of entertaining company from beyond seas; and
because, near half a century ago, we had some sharp words, spoken not
through the mouths of prophets and sages, but through the mouths of
great guns, touching the right of our venerated parent to examine the
internal economy of our merchant-ships on the sea--because of
reminiscences like these, we are to forswear all that is English! And so
we may claim no kindred in literature with Shakspeare and Milton, in
jurisprudence, with Bacon and Mansfield, in statesmanship, with Pitt and
Fox!

Whence came the spirit of independence, the fearless love of liberty of
which we boast, but from our English blood? Whence came our love of
territorial extension, our national ambition, exhibited under the
affectionate name of annexation? Does not this velvet paw with which we
softly play with our neighbors' heads, conceal some long, crooked
talons, which tell of the ancestral blood of the British Lion?

The legislature of a New England State, not many years ago, appointed a
committee to revise its statutes. This committee had a pious horror of
all dead languages, and a patriotic fear of paying too high a compliment
to England, and so reported that all proceedings in courts of law should
be in the American language! An inquiry by a waggish member, whether the
committee intended to allow proceedings to be in any one of the three
hundred Indian dialects, restored to the English language its
appropriate name.

Though from some of our national traits, we might possibly be supposed
to have sprung from the sowing of the dragon's teeth by Cadmus, yet the
uniform record of all American families which goes back to the "three
brothers who came over from England," contradicts this theory, a