ge of _virtu_), rather gives a stiffness to the drawings. This
sojourner in the desert had been in the woods for months together. He
preferred associating with the Indians to the company of the Back
Settlers; very justly, I daresay, for a civilised man of the lower
order--that is, the dregs of civilisation--when thrust back on the
savage state becomes worse than a savage. They are Wordsworth's
adventurer,

"Deliberate and undeceived
The wild men's vices who received,
And gave them back his own."[450]

The Indians, he says, are dying fast; they seem to pine and die whenever
the white population approaches them. The Shawanese, who amounted, Mr.
Audubon says, to some thousands within his memory, are almost extinct,
and so are various other tribes. Mr. Audubon could never hear any
tradition about the mammoth, though he made anxious inquiries. He gives
no countenance to the idea that the Red Indians were ever a more
civilised people than at this day, or that a more civilised people had
preceded them in North America. He refers the bricks, etc., occasionally
found, and appealed to in support of this opinion, to the earlier
settlers,--or, where kettles and other utensils may have been found, to
the early trade between the Indians and the Spaniards.

John Russell[451] and Leonard Horner[452] came to consult me about the
propriety and possibility of retaining the northern pronunciation of the
Latin in the new Edinburgh Academy.[453] I will think of it until
to-morrow, being no great judge. We had our solitary dinner; indeed, it
is only remarkable nowadays when we have a guest.

_January_ 25.--Thought during the watches of the night and a part of the
morning about the question of Latin pronunciation, and came to the
following conclusions. That the mode of pronunciation approved by
Buchanan and by Milton, and practised by all nations, excepting the
English, assimilated in sound, too, to the Spanish, Italian, and other
languages derived from the Latin, is certainly the best, and is likewise
useful as facilitating the acquisition of sounds which the Englishman
attempts in vain. Accordingly I wish the cockneyfied pedant who first
disturbed it by reading _Emo_ for _Amo_, and _quy_ for _qui_, had choked
in the attempt. But the question is, whether a youth who has been taught
in a manner different from that used all over England will be heard, if
he presumes to use his Latin at the bar or the senate; and if he is to
be