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arms on the road. The wounded were left here, and the army retired upon fort Washington.

In this fatal battle fell 38 commissioned officers, and 593 noncommissioned officers and privates. Twenty-one commissioned of ficers, many of whom afterwards died of their wounds, and 242 non-commissioned officers and privates, were wounded.

This severe disaster to an expedition, which had been deemed sufficient to look down all opposition, was as humiliating, as it was unexpected. Public opinion was unfavorable, in regard to the management of general St. Clair. He solicited a trial by a court martial; but owing to the circumstance, that there was no officer in the army of a grade, to be authorized by the usages of war to preside over the trial, he did not receive one.

[Our friend Smelfungus has remitted us another chapter of the "Miseries of Authors.' In volume, it is compared with the former, as a mountain to a mole-hill. When we state the circumstances, under which we sat down to peruse it, the good natured reader will catch a sympathetic shudder from ours. We have scarcely had two successive days of sunshine in our formerly clear and brilliant winter sky, since the 'hanging month' of November.The sun seems to have taken an affront at the fogs of vituperation, abuse and political malignity, which earth has been steaming upwards towards him-and has hidden his warm and glorious countenance in magnanimous disdain. The sweet heavens have been striving ineffectually to wash away the defilement of the times by the drenching of incessant rains. We, mean while, have been rummaging dusty shelves, and turning over dull books, and looking with dismay upon a shower of pamphlets and periodicals, ever and anon glancing our eye into a gauzy souvenir or album, and arresting it a moment upon a tale, a little nauseating, like sweetened antimonial wine. Add to this poor health, and unremitting labor, and it will not be difficult to suppose, that we were, as physicians say, 'predisposed' to the horrors, before we received this mountain of miseries. Our friend seems to find relief in venting his dolors to the winds. It is partly to oblige him, and partly with the good natured and common kindness of a desire to communicate a share of our gloom, dismay, and chagrin to our reader, that we have

made a selection from these miseries. We have an ultimate view

to his good in another point. There is really ground to apprehend, that every man, woman and child in the United States, that can read, and write, is afflicted at this time with the mania of propen sity to authorship. If every body turns author, where will be the readers? We publish now triple the number of papers, that can be supported. If we triple that number, who will pay the paper maker and printer? It may not be amiss for aspirants to count the cost, before they gird themselves to the warfare.

The compiler of these miseries has poured them forth from such a fulness of lamentation, that he seems not to have had sufficient 'method in his madness' even to number them. We have performed that duty for him, and we find in the MS. before us, a good hundred and three distinct miseries. We have selected a few choice ones, which in a cursory perusal seemed to us the most exquisite; and even them we have very much abridged. We can only hope, that they may be useful in staying the plague of au thorship. Two or three quos equus Jupiter amavit, may have ar rived at the fortune of having their lucubrations stereotyped; but for the remainder, it must be a losing concern, that of authorship, until the time, when the law, which the honest Tennesseeans are said to have passed, in the early days of their legislation, to wit, that there should be no out side rows to their corn fields, shall take ef fect.-ED.]

MISERIES OF AUTHORSHIP.

MISERY 21. To have your book reviewed by the ninth part of a man, who is positive, flippant and arrogant, as generally happens. in exact proportion to his ignorance; a man, who proves by the dulness and clumsiness of his own writings, that if he knows how to set another right, and abuse his imagined faults, it is without knowing how to apply the benefit of his knowledge to his own use and behoof; that, like the ill fated Cassandra of classical memory. he has critical skill, tact and prophecy for every body's benefit, but his own.

MISERY 40. To see yourself exposed in the columns of a heavy and splenetic newspaper to the abuse of some young tyro fresh from the academy, croaking criticism, like a young chanticleer just beginning to crow; to perceive, that this young Theban is as able to comprehend you, as he is the highest analysis of La Place, and has as many claims, from his learning, taste, feeling and capacity

to relish excellence of any sort, as an oyster has to sing sonatas; while your good natured friends are complimenting you, that you show weakness, to manifest any feeling in view of such criticisms, to be bitterly conscious, that you are not writing for fame alone; and that three will read what your critic has said of you, where one will pause to enquire, touching the justice of the criticism; to be sensible, that his criticisms lay nearer the common apprehension and taste, than your writings; and to be made aware by experience, that, fume and fret, as you may, this thing has a strong bearing and influence upon the opinion of that very public, on which you depend.

MISERY 45. To pass your night vigils in meditating, how you can shoot your new periodical through the thick shade of its hundred cotemporaries into the sun and air; to rise from the meditations of such night watchings, to see on your table next morning the announcement of fourteen new periodicals and publications; and among the rest the title of a favorite work, with which your brain has been pregnant, like that of Jove with Minerva; and now, when just ready to be delivered of your full grown progeny in complete panoply, to see yourself anticipated.

MISERY 50. To have three letters arrive by the same mail.In one, an anonymous friend, with a peculiarly disinterested affection, as he prefaces his motive, informs you, that your late book is completely dished by box, pit and gallery. The second contains a very clear and intelligible note from your paper maker, touching the paper of said book. The third is from him of the 'trade,' and in a tone of exquisite tenderness, informs, sales very limited.'No books, but those of distinguished authors, will go in these dull times. The postcript, as usual, contains the cream of the joke.You will please remember, that your note is due.' When this 'coincidence' happens, let the author avoid upper and unfurnished rooms, and the sight of all unappropriated cord.

MISERY 51. To perceive, that the envy of the whole tribe of dunces, pecus innumerabile,' is enlisted against you as surely, as if you had unquestioned merit and talent; and yet to have most mortifying doubts yourself, whether it were your merits, or defects, that united the confederacy against you.

MISERY 55. To be denied learning, because your printer has no Greek types, or because you respect your reader too much, to eke out your chapter,, with what nobody will read, instead of tasking your own brain for the matter.

MISERY 60. To find that your critic has neither the sense, courage nor heart, to let you wholly alone, nor give you unclogged praise, nor generous, decided, and vigorous abuse; but takes the middle, mean revenge of damning you with faint praise, such as 'he has reached mediocrity;' or he is 'sometimes above mediocrity,' &c. &c. Let such men read in the Dunciad.

VOL. I.-No 11.

3

"Of all mad creatures, if the learn'd are right,

It is the slaver kills, and not the bite.'

MISERY 63. Ask a critical friend, to whom you have consigned your MS. for his judgment, what he thinks of it? And have him answer your question, by proposing another, as thus-apropos," have you read that superb article upon the question of the next president? And when forced to the point, to have him add, "Oh, I had forgotten: tolerable, tolerable. But you have no chance.Too many thousand books made at this time by real authors.'

MISERY 67. To be writing ineffectually from Dan to Beersheba, to get a tolerable article of originial verse, and have a prospectus of a new work in some obscure place announce under your eye, that the poetry of that work shall be original, and of the highest order. This evil raises a smile, that almost cures it. It reminds one of the old Roman cub of a general, who sacked Corinth, if my memory serves me. Despatching some of the priceless and incomparable chefs dœuvres of captured Grecian statuary to Rome, he gave the person, charged with them, many strict cautions, to take care of them, and imposing upon him the penalty of replacing them by others of equal value, if they should be lost!!

MISERY 80. Oh! Misericordia! To be nursing a sentimental tale; to have your eyes ready to fill; to see the whole universe with the youthful confiding view of poetry, as good, amiable, benevolent, sighing, lack-a-day-saical, &c. To sit down to write with such dispositions; the morning foggy, the roads muddy, the room smoky, a murky moral atmosphere pervading the whole establishment; to begin to read a pathetic sentence for the judgment of a member of the family, and be interrupted by a boy bringing in a bill; and when the pathetic sentence is finally read, to be answered, instead of tears, with a half suppressed yawn! This kind of agony may be technically termed revulsion of association.

MISERY 90. To see a criticism upon your orthography and punctuation started by an animal, whose authority in the one case is his own Small Walker, and in the other his own mode of punctuation. He never comprehended the meaning of a member of a sentence and he never had sufficient reach of mind to discriminate between errors of the press and original defects of education;and yet he has had the fortune to start a criticism against you, which is going the rounds of the papers.

At the close of these miseries, the author adds from Gil Blas,

'Spes et fortuna, valete;

Sat me lusistis; nunc alios ludete."

POETICAL.

In descending the Mississippi, there is a long sweeping point of heavily timbered bottom, just opposite the second Chickasaw Bluff, a name which is given to one of those peninsulas of high land, which jut into the alluvion, and approach the river from time to time on its eastern side. In this bottom, at the distance of about two hundred and fifty paces from the bank of the river, there is a little grave, in which are deposited the remains of my youngest sister. She was born on our passage from Arkansas to St. Charles, in the fall of 1819, and survived only three days.. At that time, the settlements on the Mississippi were so thin, and remote, that there were often intervals of unbroken forests, extending from twenty to thirty miles along its shores. It was in the midst of one of these, and in a night of storms, that this little infant was born; and it is there, that she was buried. We were ascending the river in a small batteau, and were entirely alone, having been left by our hands a few miles below. Our solitary situation-the circumstances of her birth-the place of her burial-all, conspired to make a deep and lasting impression on my mind. Some years afterwards, I passed the same place, in the spring of the year, on my way up the river, in a steam boat. Before we arrived there, I had stolen away from the crowded bustle of the cabin, to a more secluded place on the top of the boat, that I might indulge my feelings without observation, or restraint. I shall not attempt to describe them now. I felt a desire to consecrate the memory of this 'desert born' and desert buried,' in the minds of some, whose friendship has been, and ever will be, dear to me.

LINES, ON PASSING THE GRAVE OF MY SISTER.

On yonder shore,-On yonder shore,
Now verdant with its depth of shade,
Beneath the white-arm'd sycamore,
There is a little infant laid.
Forgive this tear. A brother weeps.
'Tis there the faded flowret sleeps.

She sleeps alone. She sleeps alone.

The summer's forests o'er her wave ;.

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