Herald Of The United States

the daughter of the cottager is exalted into a countess, and the laborer at the anvil or the mine, soon graces the court and the drawing-room. The hero and heroine are involved in distresses in which no other mortals ever were involved, and generally delivered by means by which none but themselves, ever were delivered. They are, however, always married at last, and attain, in the possession of each other, such happiness as no human being ever yet attained, and such as Nature & Providence with all their bounty never will bestow. By the constant perusal of narratives of this description, the youth of both sexes are encouraged to cherish expectations that never can be realized, and to form notions of each other, which painful experience will every day refute. The mind too, by exercising only its weaker powers, becomes enervated and enfeebled, disgusted with the tumult of business, or the roughness of contradiction the most valuable season of life as spent in the part of musing, instead of the labor of thinking, in the indolence of the fairy visions of hope, and the reveries of a perverted imagination instead of the pursuit of science, the formation of maxims of wisdom, and the establishment of the principles of moral duty. The votes of the judicious are, we doubt not, against that folly. so fashionable, and so fascinating. of novel reading : but the practice of the majority is clearly on the other side ; and against measures, which they can neither approve nor prevent, all that the minority can perform, is to assert the arguments of truth, and to enter the protest of reprobation.