Monthly Review of Literature, 



84 



Among other tittle-tattle, we have Lady 

 Byron's conduct relative to my Lord's MS., 

 and Mr. Moore's surrender of it, talked over 

 again, with the strange and unwarrantable 

 insinuation that the lady made the offer of 

 indemnification to Mr. Moore, in full se- 

 curity it would not be accepted. The 

 money, in the opinion of this meddling per- 

 son, should have been settled on Muster 

 llussel (Moore's son), for whose benefit the 

 JJS., it is asserted, had been originally given ; 

 and then his papa could have have had no 

 power to refuse. "LadyB. is rich very 

 rich, it seems ; and the transaction says mwch 

 for her pride, and little for her feeling.'' 

 Now, manifestly, the writer knows no more 

 of the matter than we do his sole authority, 

 the partial and suspicious intelligence of the 

 public prints. How dares he then with all 

 his professions too to judge of that lady's 

 motives in this way ? Is this in consistency 

 with the wish, so p.ousiy expressed in the 

 preface, that the volume may breathe no 

 sentiment, which his spiritual avocations 

 must condemn contain no expression, which 

 may appear hostile to the interests of true 

 morality and true religion? Truly, to 

 preach is one thing, and to practise another. 



The Pioneers, by the A uthor of the Prai- 

 rie,2fc.; 1827. A second edition of this tale, 

 very little known in this country, but writ- 

 ten, as every body knows who attends to 

 these matters, by the author of the Prairie, 

 of which we gave a notice last month has 

 just appeared, and chronologically precedes 

 it. The central parts of the State of New 

 York, which now count nearly a million 

 and a half of inhabitants, were, so recently 

 as 1785, an untenanted wilderness. The 

 prodigious transmutation, therefore, is in our 

 own times, and distinctly traceable by living 

 witnesses. The purpose of the author, in 

 his own words, is to give some idea of the 

 manner in which this magical change has 

 been wrought, of the state of society which 

 existed during the process of alteration, and 

 of the means that were employed to' effect 

 it. The story is quite a subordinate matter, 

 though always strictly subservient to this 

 main purpose to exhibit the progress of a 

 ( clearing.' 



One Marmaduke Temple, and the son of 

 a Major Effingbam, form an early intimacy 

 .t school. The Temples are quakers, and 

 commercial people ; the Effirighams mili- 

 tary. The elder Effingham resigns his estate 

 rnto his son's hands, and the first act of the 

 son is to aid his early friend. He enables 

 him to set up a house of business in Phila- 

 delphia, and himself becomes a sleeping and 

 clandestine partner, to avoid shocking the 

 prejudices of the lather, who disdains the 

 pedlar principles of trade. Under Temple's 

 inarmgetiK'iit the concern thrives to admira- 

 tion, till the breaking out of the revolution. 

 The Efliiiglutms, before the buttle of Lex- 

 ington, quit the colony, but previously de- 

 posit in Temple's hands all their valuable 



[JULY, 



effects and papers for security. Soon after, 

 the war commenced in good earnest, and the 

 friends take opposite sides the Effinghams, 

 of course, are loyalists. On the peace, at the 

 sale of the loyalists' lands. Temple pur- 

 chases Effingham's property, on very advan- 

 tageous terms, and resolves to withdraw from 

 business, and attend to the settlement of his 

 newly acquired territory. To this place 

 the interior of the State of New York, he 

 accordingly, in 1793, goes, accompanied by 

 an only daughter, the heiress of all his pro- 

 perty, armed \iith the authority of judge; 

 and through his interest, a cousin ot his is 

 also invested with the office of sheriff. The 

 great purpose of Temple is to introduce 

 something like police into the wild district, 

 to check the waste of trees, and deer, and 

 game, and fish, which abundance generates 

 among new settlers. 



On the settlement were three conspicuous 

 persons, an old Indian chief of the extin- 

 guished Delawares ; a young man, called by 

 the old chief the Young Eagle, and reported 

 to have Delaware blood in him, and an old 

 American, Natty, of Indian and independent 

 habits. These are living apparently as hun- 

 ters, and evidently consider Temple and his 

 associates as usurpers. On his very first ar- 

 rival, Temple, shooting at a buck, acciden- 

 tally hits the Young Eagle in the shoulder, 

 withoat any very serious consequences; and 

 in concern for the injury he had thus unwit- 

 tingly done him, he labours t.o conciliate, and 

 finally succeeds in persuading him to come 

 to his house. The young man is full of mys- 

 tery and reserve. He proves to be a person 

 of high intelligence and cultivation, and suf- 

 ficiently haughty and ungracious, attribu- 

 table apparently to his Indian blood ; but he 

 gets on for some time pretty harmoniously 

 with the judge's family, and officiates as a 

 sort of secretary still, however, keeping up 

 an extraordinary degree of intimacy with his 

 old friends of the woods. With them, too, 

 there is some mystery nobody ever saw 

 the inside of their wigwam, and a good deal 

 of curiosity is of course excited. 



In the mean while, the sheriff, who is of 

 a bustliag, fidgetty, disposition, is intro- 

 ducing measures of civilization among 

 others, that of the church service and en- 

 forcing the observance of the laws of tbes 

 United States, particularly those which pro- 

 hibited the killing of deer in the breeding 

 season. Old Natty, the American, of Indian 

 habits, in contempt of this and all other 

 laws, which are not, he conceives, made for 

 the woods, kills a buck. A busy fellow gets 

 scent of this there were already lawyers on 

 the settlement, and a resolution is taken to 

 make an example of Natty, and enforce the 

 penalty. Just at this period Nutty rescues 

 the judge's daughter from the jaws of a 

 panther, and, of course, makes her his friend 

 for ever. The judge, in common consis- 

 tency could not, on being appealed to, decline 

 issuing a warrant to search Natty's hut for 

 the forbidden venison ; but Natty defends his 



